Fingertips of the Network: Featherweight Communicators and Sensors

Hewlett-Packard has a business opportunity in low-power, general-purpose, networked, 'featherweight' computing devices that act as sensors or user interaction tools. We have designed and built a set of very small devices targeted to hospital applications. The first device assists caregivers with patient management in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Each patient in the unit has a battery-powered wireless 'clipboard' that stores and displays medication plans, messages, and other patient- specific information. The clipboards use IR to communicate with Pocket PC iPAQs carried by the staff and low-power 802.15. 4 radios to communicate with a back-office data server. Hospital trials commence in 2005. In conjunction with MIT, a later deployment is planned for hospital emergency room patients. The Small Device Opportunity Hewlett-Packard's product line spans large servers to PDAs. Our work with customers has convinced us that many applications require computers small than PDAs: 'featherweight' devices with low-power wireless communication and long battery life. Featherweight devices are a rapidly expanding field where HP is well- positioned to provide network infrastructure in a variety of horizontal and vertical markets. HP may not make all the devices in this space, but we will deploy them, connect them, and manage them. There are many application areas of featherweight computing: biosensors, environmental sensors, authorization and identification tags, mobile storage, tracking people and equipment, data aggregation and storage, personal communication, and asset management. These devices have value in monitoring large buildings, military operations, emergency response teams, security, hospitals, home healthcare, and public venues such as conventions, museums, and amusement parks. In turn, the successful and productive deployment of featherweight devices requires an infrastructure that provides external connectivity and information/location-based services. A natural question is why cell phones, handhelds computers, and notebook computers are inappropriate for featherweight computing applications. Cell phones are inflexible, inextensible and heavily regulated. Notebooks and handhelds are too cumbersome and power hungry. Our group has been working for several years on solutions for the problems of mobile professionals; i.e. people who are constantly on the move. In (1), we described the integration of location-tracking with SIP-based telephony, instant message and presence to enhance communications between mobile professionals. One thing brought home to us by that study was how consistently users shut off their notebook and handheld computers to save battery power. In the past, devices in the featherweight category had negligible computation, storage, and networking capacity, limiting their broader utility. Advances in low-power computing and wireless chipsets make it possible to build capable low-cost, wirelessly networked devices using general-purpose computing and standards-based networking—which is exactly HP's area of expertise. The business opportunities for HP are in services, consulting and integration (design and deployment of semi-custom devices and applications), standards-based network equipment, servers, and management software. Challenges in this space include rapid turnaround of semi-custom designs, low-power reliable networking, location-based computing, device security, and scalable deployment and management of devices, infrastructure and applications. We are exploring the opportunities and challenges by building and deploying devices and infrastructure tailored for hospitals. Over the past year we have identified a number of promising venues for testing featherweight device technology. We will be conducting trials in two hospitals in 2005. The objective in these two trials is improving patient care by better management of information flow for patients and hospital staff. This paper focuses on the first trial with a description of the devices we have constructed and our planned deployment. The paper concludes with a description of the second trial and a discussion of future work.