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

• Authors: Martin Lablans;Frank Ückert
• Venue: Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing: Connecting the World Wirelessly
• Year: 2009

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.