Extension of Captured Information in Pervasive Healthcare Systems: A Case Study Renato de Freitas Bulcão-Neto, José Antonio Camacho-Guerrero Innolution Sistemas de Informática Ltda. Av. Tenente Catão Roxo, 2501 Ribeirão Preto-SP – Brasil rbulcao,jose.camacho@innolution.com.br Alessandra Alaniz Macedo DFM - FFCLRP - USP Universidade de São Paulo Av. dos Bandeirantes, 3900 Ribeirão Preto-SP – Brasil ale.alaniz@usp.br Abstract Research efforts in pervasive healthcare have mainly fo- cused on software infrastructures for capture and access, multimodal interaction and manipulation of context infor- mation. In this paper we discuss the importance and the use of mechanisms for the extension of information cap- tured from pervasive healthcare environments. Based on our findings from a field study of medical grand rounds, we developed a capture and access prototype application inte- grated to an association module, which automatically iden- tifies and creates semantic relationships between patients information. This can be very helpful for physicians, which commonly try to mentally relate clinical cases to achieve a safer and more efficient health care treatment. 1. Introduction Ubiquitous computing is a paradigm in which humans interact with dynamic networked processing devices dis- tributed at several scales, and generally turned to quotidian tasks carried out away from the desktop [20]. Recently there has been a trend to look at ways of using ubiquitous computing infrastructures for developing health- care systems (hereafter called pervasive healthcare sys- tems). For instance, Kientz et al. [11] developed a system that helps parents and caregivers of children with autism capture and document their child’s developmental progress. In order to support surgeons and nurses, the ActiveThe- atre [8] system captures events from collaborative activities performed before, during and after a surgical procedure. Many research efforts in pervasive healthcare have fo- cused on software infrastructures for capture and ac- cess [10], multimodal interaction [9] and manipulation of context information [1]. However, pervasive healthcare sys- tems could also take advantage of other research efforts aiming at extending information since it is a common task in healthcare workers’ everyday activities represented by annotations and associations. When assessing medical im- ages, physicians make digital ink-based notes that help con- textualize their reports. Physicians often try to associate a clinical problem of a patient to other patients’ problems to achieve a safer and more efficient health care treatment. Since healthcare workers have the focus of attention on the underlying information being informed by patients and manipulated by their machines, we are investigating mech- anisms upon underlying hypertext models to extend infor- mation captured from pervasive healthcare applications. In this paper we propose to create hypertext links to re- late information captured before, during and after health- care workers’ activities in medical grand rounds. Medical grand rounds are quotidian meeting activities where physi- cians discuss clinical problems of patients. We describe our proposal presenting a study using a capture and access ap- plication exploited in a medical grand round experience. Exploiting our proposal, pervasive healthcare applica- tions could become more interactive and helpful. The med- ical grand round participants, involved with activities, will be able to get access to related material without losing the focus of attention on the underlying information being pre- sented. Although we have found related work also imple- menting an underlying hypertext model for captured infor- mation retrieval purposes, they are deployed in other do- mains, e.g. education [16] and meeting [18]. Besides, to the best of our knowledge, we have not found pervasive health- care systems aiming to augment captured material. The remaining sections of this paper are organized as follows: we first present previous work supporting our pro- posal; we then describe our proposal; next, we present an initial prototype; finally, we summarize the benefits of our approach, and also comment on future work. The 11th IEEE International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering - Workshops 978-0-7695-3257-8/08 $25.00 © 2008 IEEE DOI 19 The 11th IEEE International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering - Workshops 978-0-7695-3257-8/08 $25.00 © 2008 IEEE DOI 10.1109/CSEW.2008.14 19 The 11th IEEE International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering - Workshops 978-0-7695-3257-8/08 $25.00 © 2008 IEEE DOI 10.1109/CSEW.2008.14 19 The 11th IEEE International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering - Workshops 978-0-7695-3257-8/08 $25.00 © 2008 IEEE DOI 10.1109/CSEW.2008.14 19 The 11th IEEE International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering - Workshops 978-0-7695-3257-8/08 $25.00 © 2008 IEEE DOI 10.1109/CSEW.2008.14 19 The 11th IEEE International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering - Workshops 978-0-7695-3257-8/08 $25.00 © 2008 IEEE DOI 10.1109/CSEW.2008.14 19 The 11th IEEE International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering - Workshops 978-0-7695-3257-8/08 $25.00 © 2008 IEEE DOI 10.1109/CSEW.2008.14 19