Project Requirements
This is also spelled out in the Word document but here is a summary of who is eligible and what is required.
What are we offering?
This is what we are offering to members of the PocketProf Project.
 | PDA unit - assisted purchasing |
| Memory card |
| Medical software |
| Custom applications for project |
Who is eligible?
There are various stages of this project and different groups are eligible to enter at different times. If you have had an email from David Topps inviting you to be part of the project, that is a good sign (!). We hope to eventually extend this to a significant proportion of teaching faculty in the Family Medicine Department. This means all GFTs and quite a number of Clinical Faculty.
You must have a Department Appointment. You must have significant involvement with teaching. As funding allows, we will broaden the radius of this circle. If you think you may be eligible, please contact us.
What is required?
Commitment. We do want feedback from users in this project. There will be questionnaires and discussion groups. You will be expected to participate where possible. No lurkers! (Newsgroup term meaning silent passive reader who never speaks up.)
A computer. You must have access to a desktop or laptop computer that is not publicly accessible. You will be storing information on there that may be somewhat personal and you will also be storing licensed copies of software that are not for distribution beyond the project group. So, in other words, a machine in the doctors' lounge doesn't cut it. This machine will be used to backup your data and also to install program updates.
This computer must be running one of the following operating systems:
| Windows 98 Release 2 |
| Windows ME |
| Windows 2000 |
| Windows XP |
There are too many technical problems with linking PDAs to Macs so we cannot support that platform. Windows 95 is too old - but upgrading is quite easy.
We also recommend that your machine has a USB port. See picture of the cable that fits in this type of socket - the wider end on the left is what would plug into your desktop machine.
A USB port is quite common on machines since 2001. If you do not have one, it is fairly easy and cheap to have the store add one for you. If this is not possible, then you can also use the plain old serial port to link to your PDA but this is much slower.