What is Collaborative Environment

A residential care home is a suitable environment to implement a software system providing users the functionality and the information required at any time, whichever place, and circumstance. The advances of technology in the last few years have made the design of the system possible; the system will employ features regarding collaboration, ubiquity, and context-awareness. Firstly, defining the architecture of the system is necessary to guarantee a proper design and implementation. This chapter deals with those subjects. The architectural proposal is described from the hardware and software perspectives. The hardware architecture shows the distribution of the hardware components to be used: mobile devices, servers, communications, etc.; on the other hand, the software architecture shows the distribution of the system components by layers based on the functionality and information processing. Awareness is a key issue to be considered in the design of the proposed system from the point of view of collaboration; therefore, an analysis about how to handle and consider this feature on both architectures is depicted.