Collaboration enhancement through tangible metaphors: Application to home care rescheduling

Actors involved in synchronous collaboration activities usually need to exchange information in order to make decisions. Collaboration is often expected, because of the need to discuss multiple views about the same system for negotiating the decision. Indeed, this is a complete cognitive, information and communication issue. In the home care context, a weekly plan is usually defined at the beginning of each week to schedule nurses' activities, sometime supported by an optimization algorithm. However, unexpected events may occur during the execution of the visits, which require adapting the initial plan, i.e., a daily local replanning. Modifications to the plan must be introduced in a short time, and they usually require violating some constraints which are taken into account in the weekly plan. In this case, only human brains can decide which constraints should be left aside and which ones respected. Depending on the size of the home care provider, this decision may involve several planners and, thus, this is also a collaborative issue. The original idea of this research was to propose a new interaction system to support the collaboration among planners during this negotiation phase. While developing such system, we found that new interaction models simplify the understanding of the issues, and that collaboration can be minimized for simpler issues and saved for more complex ones. In this paper, we describe the developed system and we discuss the collaboration issue for the daily replanning of home care nurses' activities.