The objective of this study was to compare the public perception in desert and rainy regions of Chile regarding the reuse of treated sewage water. The methodology of this study consisted of applying a survey to the communities of San Pedro de Atacama (desert region) and Hualqui (rainy region) to identify attitudes about the reuse of sewage water. The survey was applied directly to men and women, 18 to 90 years old, who were living in the studied communities. The results indicate that inhabitants of San Pedro de Atacama (desert region) were aware of the state of their water resources, with 86% being aware that there are water shortages during some part of the year. In contrast, only 55% of residents in Hualqui (rainy region) were aware of water shortages. With respect of the reuse of treated sewage water, 47% of respondents in San Pedro de Atacama understood the concept, as compared to 27% in Hualqui. There was more acceptance of using treated sewage water for non-potable purposes than as drinking water.

Hospital work is characterized by intense mobility, a frequent switching between tasks, and the need to collaborate and coordinate activities among specialists. These working conditions impose important demands on hospital staff, whose attention becomes a limited and important resource to administer. Nurses in particular, need to constantly monitor the status of patients in order to assess their condition, assist them and/or notify physicians or specialists. Given their work load, it is not rare for them to miss important events, such as a catheter being disconnected due to the patient movement or the need to change a urine bag that has been filled. Pervasive technologies by being able to continuously monitor patients could provide awareness of the patients’ health condition. This awareness must be subtle, expressive, and unobtrusive without intruding on hospital workers’ focal activity. In this chapter the authors explore the use of ambient displays to adequately monitor patient’s health status and promptly and opportunistically notify hospital workers of those changes. To show the feasibility and applicability of ambient displays in hospitals they designed and developed two ambient displays that can be used to provide awareness patients’ health status to hospital workers. The first display takes into account the mobility experienced by nurses during their work to supervise the activities of daily living (ADL) conducted by patients. The second display is a flower vase that notifies nurses the urine output of patients and the status of their urine bag.

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Sentient computing can provide ambient intelligence environments with devices capable of inferring and interpreting context, while ambient displays allow for natural and subtle interactions with such environment. In this paper we propose to combine sentient devices and ambient displays to augment everyday objects. These sentient displays are aware of their surroundings while providing continuous information in a peripheral, subtle, and expressive manner. To seamlessly convey information to multiple sentient displays in the environment, we also propose an approach based on abstract interfaces which use contextual information to decide which display to use and how the information in the display changes in response to the environment. Our approach is illustrated through a hospital monitoring application. We present the design of two sentient displays that provide awareness of patient’s urine outputs to hospital workers, and how contextual information is used to integrate the functionality of both displays.