We describe a map-based location-based service 'GeoHealth' for home healthcare workers who attend patients at home within a large geographical area. Informed by field studies of work activities and interviews with care providers, we have designed a mobile location-based service prototype supporting collaboration through information sharing and distributed electronic patient records. The GeoHealth prototype gives the users live contextual information about patients, coworkers, current and scheduled work activities and alarms adapted to their geographical location. The application is web-based and uses Google Maps, Global Positioning System (GPS) and Web 2.0 technology to provide a lightweight, dynamic and interactive representation of the work domain supporting distributed collaboration, communication and peripheral awareness among nomadic workers. Through a user-based evaluation, we found that the healthcare workers were positive towards the use of location-based services in their work, and that the dynamic and interactive geospatial representation of the work domain provided by GeoHealth supported distributed collaboration, communication and peripheral awareness. We also identified areas for improvements.

In this paper, we describe GeoHealth -a geographical information system prototype for home healthcare workers who during a normal workday have to attend clients and patients that are physically distributed over a large geographical area. Informed by field studies of work activities and interviews with the healthcare workers, we have designed an interactive location-based service for supporting distributed mobile collaboration. The prototype explores a representational approach to context-awareness and represents live contextual information about clients/patients, coworkers, current and scheduled work activities, and alarms adapted to the users' location. The prototype application is webbased and uses Google Maps, GPS positioning, and Web 2.0 technology to provide a lightweight dynamic and interactive representation of the work domain supporting distributed collaboration, communication, and peripheral awareness among nomadic workers.