This paper presents an ethnographic study of mobile communication at a surgical unit in Sweden involved with highly specialized care for the upper abdomen. The primary focus of the study is interruptions related to usage of mobile communication, with the goal of informing the design of systems that better balance interruptions and availability. The department uses a patchwork of hospital pagers, personal cell phones, and department provided cell phones. Issues related to social factors at the department, technical features of mobile communication devices, and specific contexts where interruptions were identified to be a problem are presented. Some of the salient findings of the study include a generally complex situation with respect to interruptions that is impacted by technical, social and individual factors related to mobile communication, challenges related to managing personal and private communication on the same device, issues related to supporting distributed work in highly specialized care and how this contributes to interruptions, and a more in depth overview of specific contexts where interruptions are problematic than previous studies. Some theoretical perspectives on these issues are presented as well as implications for design.

This paper presents an interpretive case study on extraction of disease surveillance data from Electronic Patient Records (EPRs) in primary care. The General Practitioners (GPs) use of the EPR system, and the effect this has on data content, such as symptoms reported by patients and diagnoses reported by GPs, is discussed. The paper contributes to greater understanding of sociotechnical issues related to disease surveillance, and contains illustrative examples of many issues important to CSCW. This includes how data collected in one context may be applied to a different context, and the delicate interplay between organizational and technical design challenges.

This paper presents two case studies of informal group communication using multimedia conferencing that supports various media including video, audio and chat. The studies provide a comparison of audio and chat as communication medium and present data on usage patterns, user preferences and attitudes. The quantitative and qualitative data collected suggest that chat does have advantages in some situations when used for informal communication along with video. The results provide evidence against the hypothesis that chat is a low bandwidth alternative only used when audio communication is unavailable. This suggests that video mediated chat deserves further attention from designers and the research community, since it is often ignored as a "useful" scenario.

Studies of video conferencing systems generally focus on scenarios where users communicate using an audio channel. However, text chat serves users in a wide variety of contexts, and is commonly included in multimedia conferencing systems as a complement to the audio channel. This paper introduces a prototype application which integrates video and text communication, and describes a formative evaluation of the prototype with 53 users in a social setting. We focus the evaluation on bandwidth and view navigation requirements in order to determine how to better serve users with video chat, and discuss how the findings from this evaluation can inform the design of future video chat applications. Bandwidth requirements are evaluated through user perceptions of video delivered using three different bandwidth schemes. For view navigation, we examine a system that automatically switches the video focus to the current "chatter", instead of requiring users to navigate manually to find the video steam they are interested in viewing.

The paper presents a middleware that applies a microeconomic model to help multimedia applications utilize available bandwidth in a way that maximizes the user's net benefit. The key components are a bandwidth broker that puts the supply of available bandwidth on a virtual market, and utility functions for each piece of media, which are used to calculate the relative gain they can offer the user by using this bandwidth. Basic supply and demand principles are used where the broker raises the price if the total demand from all media exceeds the available supply, or lowers the price if the demand is lower than the available supply.

In this paper, bandwidth-sharing schemes, controlled by user-interest, are presented as an approach to efficient use of resources in a collaborative workspace environment. Two schemes for group videoconferencing are presented and evaluated. Monitoring of user-behavior and message passing to adapt video bandwidth allocation to user needs are key features of both schemes, in which each user's client reports interest in other users to enable them to determine their relative importance. Experimental results using a prototype implementation to sample user-behavior show that one scheme is better suited for high, and the other for low bandwidth-limit scenarios. Measurements also show that the message passing does not add a substantial amount of bandwidth.