AN ASYNCHRONOUS COOPERATIVE MODEL FOR COORDINATING MEDICAL UNIT ACTIVITIES

CSCW is devoted to the analysis of interactions among human beings whe n performing their work together (Ellis et al., Commun. ACM 1 (34) (19 91) 38-58). The main fields of application are work organisation, heal thcare, education and training. Our main goal is to study the co-opera tive mod-ls allowing task co-ordination and conflict management betwee n actors within a distributed environment, particularly in medical uni ts. We do not aim to produce a practical system suitable for near-term deployment in the intensive care units (ICU), but rather an experimen tal system that performs and co-ordinates a range of intelligent plann ing tasks in ICU activities. The emphasis will be put especially on as ynchronous co-operation. We apply the Workflow approach to ICU organis ation through the analysis and the proposal of a co-operative model. ( C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd.