Biomedical subjects

Nathalie Bricon-Souf

Publications and source records attributed to Nathalie Bricon-Souf.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Context awareness in health care: a review.

BACKGROUND: Health care systems will integrate new computing paradigms in the coming years. Context-awareness computing is a research field which often refers to health care as an interesting and rich area of application. AIM: Through a survey of the research literature, we intended to derive an objective view of the actual dynamism of context awareness in health care, and to identify strengths and weaknesses in this field. METHODS: After discussing definitions of context, we proposed a simple framework to analyse and characterize the use of context through three main axes. We then focused on context-awareness computing and reported on the main teams working in this area. We described some of the context-awareness projects in health care. A deeper analysis of the hospital-based projects demonstrated the gap between recommendations expressed for modelling context awareness and the actual use in a prototype. Finally, we identified pitfalls encountered in this area of research. RESULTS: A number of opportunities remain for this evolving field of research. We found relatively few groups with such a specific focus. As yet there is no consensus as to the most appropriate models or attributes to include in context awareness. We conclude that a greater understanding of which aspects of context are important in a health care setting is required; the inherent sociotechnical nature of context-aware applications in health care; and the need to draw on a number of disciplines to conduct this research.

Biomedical Technology↗

PubMed2006

A study of the communication notes for two asynchronous collaborative activities.

INTRODUCTION: To build relevant tools for Health Care Professionals, we must study and understand their practices. This paper discusses the way they leave traces in the Patient Record to help asynchronous collaboration, elaborating new documents or adding annotations. METHODS: We compared the results of two studies about the various writing strategies used by the Health Care Professionals to capture knowledge in the Patient Records. The first study deals with the information written by the nurses in a textbook during homecare situations. The second one deals with the annotations left by all the practitioners to complete the documents of the patient record in a hospital ward. RESULTS: We have found some invariants in these two situations. An interpretation model based on four levels: Communication Context, Communication Object, Value of Communication and Value of Cooperation, is proposed in order to describe and to index the characteristics of the Communication Notes.

Cooperative Behavior↗

PubMed2005

A distributed coordination platform for home care: analysis, framework and prototype.

Good cooperation between health care (HC) professionals, patient, and family is indispensable during homecare as mentioned in reports and analyses from different countries. In a French National project named coordination for the quality of care (COQUAS), we aimed to address the problem of improving such cooperation with current tools and techniques. We hypothesized that, as in some other domains, a better integration of use and users in informatics systems could improve the usefulness of the cooperative tool. The first part of this paper is devoted to the cognitive analysis of the homecare process and highlights the requirements which should be met according to this analysis. We describe some specific features of asynchronous cooperation and some communication issues in the cooperation of HC workers. We then detail the analysis of the homecare process: methodology, description of the processes, cognitive activity analyses, and of the requirements which flow from this analysis. The second part of this paper proposes a framework and then describes a modular system prototype, designed to take into account these requirements, including aspects of both cooperation and interoperability. It uses a meta-description of actions and information derived from a cognitive study to build dynamically the interface settings; it respects the current trend in distributed architecture and uses XML communication of messages, manages complex coordination with a workflow and allows mobile work. The last part of the paper presents the evaluation which has been done with the implemented prototype, with actual homecare users.

Communication↗

PubMed2004

Homecare: the need for cooperative information systems.

Assuming responsibility of patients at home (Homecare) is organized around a complex cooperation of partners: health care actors, relatives and helpers, all of whom intervene in the patient's home and who spark off the setting up of cooperative information systems. We present our work relating to such systems within the context of home care. Such activity is based on the collaboration of multiple mobile actors, obtaining information in a multimodal fashion, while taking the job profiles and professional grades of the users into account. Information is obtained from heterogeneous systems. The quality of management of the activity of the various health care actors and of the feedback on information handled at the time of the homecare process will determine how easy it may be to set up homecare as well as the quality of care. In this paper we outline the main stages of our work: grasping the context of homecare and studying co-operative activity from a fundamental point of view but also as applied to homecare. We describe the system proposed for accessing distributed information and for organizing the supervision of the 2 fundamental processes: (1) the LOGISTICAL process (to manage the organization), (2) and the CARE Process (to follow-up the medical or nursing status of the patient), and then we enhance the contribution of mobile technologies in this context.

Cell Phone↗