Homecare: the need for cooperative information systems.

Assuming responsibility of patients at home (Homecare) is organized around a complex cooperation of partners: health care actors, relatives and helpers, all of whom intervene in the patient's home and who spark off the setting up of cooperative information systems. We present our work relating to such systems within the context of home care. Such activity is based on the collaboration of multiple mobile actors, obtaining information in a multimodal fashion, while taking the job profiles and professional grades of the users into account. Information is obtained from heterogeneous systems. The quality of management of the activity of the various health care actors and of the feedback on information handled at the time of the homecare process will determine how easy it may be to set up homecare as well as the quality of care. In this paper we outline the main stages of our work: grasping the context of homecare and studying co-operative activity from a fundamental point of view but also as applied to homecare. We describe the system proposed for accessing distributed information and for organizing the supervision of the 2 fundamental processes: (1) the LOGISTICAL process (to manage the organization), (2) and the CARE Process (to follow-up the medical or nursing status of the patient), and then we enhance the contribution of mobile technologies in this context.