Intensive Care Units are considered a critical environment where the decision needs to be carefully taken. The real-time recognition of the condition of the patient is important to drive the decision process efficiently. In order to help the decision process, a Pervasive Intelligent Decision Support System (PIDSS) was developed. To provide a better comprehension of the acceptance of the PIDSS it is very important to assess how the users accept the system at level of usability and their importance in the Decision Making Process. This assessment was made using the four constructs proposed by the Technology Acceptance Methodology and a questionnaire-based approach guided by the Delphi Methodology. The results obtained so far show that although the users are satisfied with the offered information recognizing its importance, they demand for a faster system.

The process of deploy a technology in critical services need to be very careful planned and processed. As an example it is the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). In the ICU the patients are in critically ill conditions and there are not available time to make experiences or to develop incomplete systems. With the objective to improve the implementation process, the same should be accompanied in order to understand the environment and user behaviour. In this case and with the goal to evaluate the implementation process, an assessment model was applied to a real system called INTCare. INTCare is a Pervasive Intelligent Decision Support System (PIDSS). It was deployed in the ICU of Centro Hospitalar do Porto and was evaluated using the Technology Acceptance Model 3 (TAM). This assessment was made using the four constructs proposed by the TAM and a questionnaire-based approach guided by the Delphi Methodology. The results obtained so far show that although the users are satisfied with the offered information recognizing this importance, they demand for a faster system. This work present the main results achieved and suggest one way to follow when some technology is deployed in an environment like is ICU.

The usability of information systems in critical environments like Intensive Care Units (ICU) is far than the expected and desirable. Typically, ICUs have a set of not integrated information silos and a high number of data recorded in paper. Whenever ICU professionals need to make a decision they have to deal with a high number of data sources containing useful information. Unfortunately, they can't use those sources due to the difficulty of evaluating them in a correct time. Pervasive Intelligent Decision Support Systems (PIDSS), operating automatically and in real-time, can be used to improve the decision making if they are suited to the requirements of the ICU. In this work a PIDSS have been assessed in terms of quality and user acceptance making use of Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). TAM proved to be very useful when combined with Delphi method features to involve the professionals and to make the system usable.