Abstract
Mobile technology has been piloted in a variety of domains. We investigate the use of smart phones in the hospital environment, as they can play an important role in the recording and exchanging of information. This paper examines how context can be characterised for developing context sensitive user interfaces for smart phone application in a hospital environment. We introduce a new characterisation of the notion of context, based on the principle of separation of the concerns that are relevant to the application domain. We coin the term context descriptor, which captures the notion of context at the end-user level, while the characterisation of the context incorporates the user model via the user stereotype. We use a sub-domain of health care, nursing services, the tasks of the nurses serving as a living example to illustrate the ideas presented. (C) 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of [name organizer]