Location-aware access to hospital information and services

Hospital workers are highly mobile; they are constantly changing location to perform their daily work, which includes visiting patients, locating resources, such as medical records, or consulting with other specialists. The information required by these specialists is highly dependent on their location. Access to a patient's laboratory results might be more relevant when the physician is near the patient's bed and not elsewhere. We describe a location-aware medical information system that was developed to provide access to resources such as patient's records or the location of a medical specialist, based on the user's location. The system is based on a handheld computer which includes a trained backpropagation neural-network used to estimate the user's location and a client to access information from the hospital information system that is relevant to the user's current location.