Abstract
The commonest wireless communication device for hospital nurses is PHS (Personal Handy-phone System) in Japan. The present study shows the limit of communication efficiency with handy phone and suggests the way to group destination of messages together. Most delivered messages to PHS were from the nurse call system, namely from the patients who can be confirmed on the small PHS LCD. It works well as nurse call system, but inconvenient to some extent for calling from nurse to other staffs. Because each PHS phone is managed with the proper phone number, we must know which number, changing alternately everyday, is assigned to the intended recipient today. Neither short message of PHS nor e-mail on PC would convince the nurses to let the doctor know a message. They prefer realtime verbal communication for a rapid and reliable response. Therefore, personal addressing methods on the phone system are demanded. Nurse units in the hospital are also the units of communication, most message recipients are confined to the unit, where it means also locally limitted area. Consequently the most requisite device for the hospital nurse is a smartphone like tool to locate and call the target person within her nurse unit territory.
