Figure 1.

The traditional place-oriented and static nurse call system vs. the future person-oriented and context-aware approach. The architecture of traditional nurse call systems can be viewed in the left part of the figure. Each room has at least one button which can be used by the patient to call a nurse. All the buttons in a room are connected to a Node. All the Nodes of a department are connected with each other and a Controller. The Controller has the intelligence to know what must happen when a call is made, for example which nurses must be called. A PC can be used to configure the controller. The nurses possess beepers or portable phone on which they can receive calls. Within a department, the Nodes can be further divided into different, possibly overlapping, nursing groups. A nurse will only receive calls of the nursing groups that this nurse is assigned to. The proposed architecture of the person-oriented and context-aware nurse call system can be viewed in the right part of the figure. Each patient has a mobile button so that they can walk around freely and still make calls. These calls are picked up by the sensor network and processed by the Controller. The Controller calls a nurse to handle the call. The nurse receives the call on his or her PDA.