Composition of New Features into a Wireless Nurse Call System

Abstract

Healthcare needs are evolving constantly, some of these needs are already being covered by current technology but some are still not. This thesis offers a critical review of former work relating to ICT and hospitals, evaluating the hospital needs from a communication point of view and examining the most relevant alternatives to provide wireless communication in healthcare. An analysis of the nurse call system currently in use at St. Olav s Hospital (Trondheim, Norway) is also provided along several viable alternatives to reengineer it.The aforementioned system has been fully characterized and modeled from scratch using UML 2.3 and the resulting reengineered version has been discussed in detail. Two new features that could enhance the user s satisfaction with the system have been identified (assistance call and lunch break) and implemented into it in a way that minimizes the modifications made to the system, in order to facilitate a possible implementation on the existing system at St. Olav s Hospital.One issue that remains to be solved are the delays: all the wireless communication options reviewed have them (from 20 seconds to 2 minutes, depending on the technology), which makes them unsuitable for emergency situations where time is of the essence. Although that doesn t mean that they are useless, it simply means that an alternate communication method is necessary for those situations, which can be used to complement the wireless system by adding a level of redundancy to it.