Edinburgh Napier University

  This paper discusses the introduction of a wireless network of personal digital assistants into a specialist unit of a hospital in Edinburgh. All of the technology has been used ‘off-the-shelf’ and ‘out-of-the-box’. While we are able to report that the heterogeneous elements of this implementation have been integrated, work well together and that the users of the system are happy with it, the hospital context itself introduced a number of significant practical issues. Hospitals are understandably very concerned about the security and confidentiality of patient records and with the potential for mutual interference between the wireless PDAs and other sensitive, wireless telemetric medical systems. Having dealt with these ultimately tractable infrastructural issues we also note the importance of identifying the ‘killer application’ of the PDAs in achieving a critical mass of end users, and indicate areas for further work.