Abstract-Day hospital workflows are highly dynamic. It is, therefore, important to provide patients with timely information about their next activity, where it takes place, and when it starts. In this paper we present MobiDay, a novel mobile service integrated in the hospital information system that supports patients and clinicians in a day hospital scenario. We describe the MobiDay message-posting algorithm that uses context-aware rules provided by clinicians to decide the time and content of the guidance messages sent to the patient's device. MobiDay was tested with real patients during a 4-months-long experiment held in the hospital of Meran in South Tyrol, Italy. Here we report on the system evaluation results. Moreover, we discuss the pros and cons of MobiDay design choices and propose some general guidelines for the development of effective message-based mobile guidance services for patients.

In this paper we investigate the impact of patient's profile on the usability of filling clinical questionnaires on smart devices. Our study was conducted in an oncological day hospital, where the EORTC QLQ-C30 quality of life questionnaire is administered to outpatients using computerized devices (smartphone, tablet, and laptop) and a paper form. We show that all the devices are evaluated as usable by the patients, under the dimension of easiness of use, and provided information. Moreover, we show that the patient's cognitive functioning (CF) impacts negatively on the evaluated usability of laptop-based surveys, suggesting that CF must be taken into account in the GUI design. Finally, we illustrate that the patient age and her technological skills also have a negative impact on the evaluated usability.