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Carawan: a clinical documentation system for use in mobile ad-hoc networks

Published: 21 June 2009 Publication History

Abstract

Clinical documentation systems are commonly used in hospitals to efficiently manage patient data. In areas of crises such as refugee camps, however, physicians are forced to resort to conventional paper-based documentation: The camps lack essential IT infrastructure, computers are regarded unreliable and complicated, and network cabling would restrict the users' mobility. A software aiding physicians in such a scenario must be easy to use, offer a high degree of reliability but yet manage without any infrastructure except energy.
In this paper, we present a clinical documentation system allowing technically untrained users to electronically create and edit Healthcards, a basic health documentation form proposed by the WHO. Changes are distributed and received automatically using a wireless mobile ad-hoc network. Each notebook computer functions as a node participating in a pure peer to peer network without the need for a server. Not relying on a distinguished server or network cabling, the system aims to be quickly established, yet deliver a high degree of reliability and mobility to its users. On the other hand, the system has no authoritative instance that helps announce and distribute new datasets, manage versioning conflicts or determine whether a given Healthcard is up-to-date. We propose a request-response-based system for exchanging datasets, utilizing timestamps to resolve versioning conflicts and negotiating per-Healthcard IDs which can be used to determine whether a Healthcard is up-to-date.

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cover image ACM Conferences
IWCMC '09: Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing: Connecting the World Wirelessly
June 2009
1561 pages
ISBN:9781605585697
DOI:10.1145/1582379
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 21 June 2009

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Author Tags

  1. MANET
  2. P2P
  3. carawan
  4. consistency

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