Horizontal versus vertical development of the HCI in the WardinHand project

WardinHand is an IT project of the European Community, dedicated to the management and support of the daily activity of doctors and nurses in a hospital unit. One of its peculiar features is that of bringing the patient data to the place-of-care with an ubiquitous approach, by using Pocket PCs connected in a WiFi LAN covering the wards of an hospital unit. The role of WardinHand HCI is discussed in this paper. We tested some kind of natural interfaces for improving user-computer interactions in uncomfortable situations (in sunny light and/or in noisy environments). Our first efforts have focused on speech-based input and application; handwriting recognition is available for free on Pocket PCs as a software input panel (SIP) component usable under the complete control of the user. We based our HCI on WEB technologies integrated with two small components dedicated to textual data input and remote speech recognition management, respectively.