PDAs in medical education and practice

We report from an on-going project, KNOWMOBILE, that explores how wireless and mobile technologies, in this case how personal digital assistants (PDAs) may be useful in medical education and clinical practice, particularly to access net-based information as needed. KNOWMOBILE is a research collaboration comprising academic and industrial partners including InterMedia, the Department of Informatics and the School of Medicine at University of Oslo, CUT at the University of Umea, Telenor R&D, Ericsson, Hewlett-Packard, and MedCal. The KNOWMOBILE project aims to support problem-based learning (PBL) and the integration of evidence based medicine (EBM) in the medical education reform in Norway. What does 'just-in-time' access to information mean in clinical settings? How can health professionals be helped with access to the most up-to-date medical information? From preliminary analyses of the problematics of PDAs in use-and nonuse-we discuss problems regarding information and communication infrastructure that call upon us to work from a social historical interpretation of 'infrastructures' in order to better inform design perspectives and directions for future research. We conclude that the PDAs should not be regarded as personal digital assistants, but rather as gateways in complicated webs of interdependent technical and social networks.