Excitor was formed in 2001, and since then has grow to its current roster of 20 staff. Excitor started as a CRM solutions company using Lotus Notes technology. Its move into mobile software grew out of the frustrations that the wife of founding partner Lars Gravesen had working as a nurse caring for senior citizens.

A nurses working day started travelling into City Hall to collect details of the days visits, which on some occasions meant driving 10 miles into town only to return to a senior citizen who lived virtually next door. At the end of the day the nurses would have to return to City Hall and spend a considerable time entering information into the local authority’s management system on the days visits, what they involved and any medications administered.

“We realized that this system was inefficient,” says Karsten Viuf, Excitor’s sales director. “With the increasing population of senior citizens in Denmark, which is expected to double in the next 10 years, it was clear that with nurses spending so much time on travel and administration they were not providing care to the elderly. So we devised MobileCare to eliminate these problems.”

MobileCare interfaces directly with a local authorities care management system so that each morning a nurse dials into the system from their Nokia Communicator and collects the details of the days visits. During the day, as the visits are completed the nurse record the visits details on the Nokia Communicator and then uploads the information back into the care system at the end of the day.

“MobileCare has had a huge impact on the nurses who use it,” says Karsten. “They have to travel less, there is no need to record information about their day twice and what has been very pleasing to us is that the staff using our system have reported that they have found their job significantly less stressful.”

The choice of the Nokia Communicator for the MobileCare application was driven mainly by hardware the characteristics Excitor consider they needed for the target user group. “The staff who use MobileCare tend to be more mature nurses, many of whom have never used a PC,” says Lasse Loevdahl, Senior Developer. “This target group find it difficult to adjust to the pen based interface used on many handheld devices. Also as the application is designed to allow the user to update journals and medical records these tasks are so much faster on a keyboard.” A second feature which sold the Nokia Communicator to Excitor is the hands free speaker phone. “The healthcare worker who use our system often need to discuss medical matters with the senior citizen and their Doctor. The quality of the communicators handsfree system means that everyone can easily participate in a call,” says Lasse.

Another practical advantage of the Communicator is its four command buttons. “The command buttons allows us make the key application easily accessible to the user,” says Lasse. “It has allowed us to make the functions really simple to use, in fact we usually only need to give the users a few hours training and they are quite comfortable with the application.”

The implementation of MobileCare on the Nokia Communicator was a relatively straightforward job for Excitor as it used Java as they development language, which meant it avoided most of the hurdles usually associated with learning Symbian C++. However it was not able to avoid C++ entirely. “There were a number of areas where we needed to do things which were not supported in the native Java implementation. We had to create JNI’s for a number of features particularly around the Communicators telephony and network capabilities,” says Lasse.

“Our C++ developer found working with Symbian C++ frustrating at first because so much of the way Symbian OS uses C++ is different from other platforms,” says Lasse. “His frustrations were compounded by the fact that he had a number of C++ code libraries for standard tasks. He also made use of open source software for our earlier non-Symbian OS projects. These approaches, which saved time in the past, were not straightforward with Symbian OS as the code needed to be extensively re-written.”

Despite being Forum Nokia Pro members Excitor found that the public forums provided by Forum Nokia, the developer pages at Symbian and Forum Nokia and use of Google allowed them to answer all of the development questions they had. However Lasse expects that as Excitor gets more involved in Symbian OS development the development team will make more use of Forum Nokia PRO’s developer services.

Forum Nokia PRO was however critical in allowing Excitor to migrate the MobileCare application to the new Nokia 9500 Communicator.

Lasse was please with the Java implementation on the Communicator. “The implementation is way better than others on the market, quite excellent in fact,” he says. If there was one problem it was performance, but this was only noticed by the developers. “We work on powerful dual Pentium PC desktops,” says Lasse. “And when we see the application running on the Communicator it seems slow by comparison, but we do not get that complaint from our customers. They see the application as really fast as they are able to process information much quicker than they did in the past.”

The experience working with Symbian OS has been a positive one for Excitor, so much so that they are now developing a new enterprise application targeted at Series 60, this time using full Symbian OS C++. “One of the advantages we have found in working in C++ comes from being able to take advantage of Nokia’s Developer Platforms,” says Lasse. “This makes it really easy to migrate an application from Series 60 to Series 80, we are even considering recoding some parts of MobileCare in C++ in the future.”

Both Lasse and Karsten are enthusiastic about the 9500. “MobileCare is already a very cost efficient application,” says Karsten. “The application replicates about 40Kb of data each morning and evening so costs our customers less than one dollar US a day to run. With the 9500’s WiFi capabilities local authorities can control the costs even further by using their Hotspots to transfer data with no airtime costs at all.” The application does have some additional features which use further airtime, such as the ability to download journals on demand for acute emergencies or to provide maps with driving directions.

This frugal use of airtime has proved to have its disadvantages. “We would like to enlist the support of wireless operators in marketing our solution,” says Karsten. “But it has proved to be of very little interest to them because the airtime costs are so low.”

Excitor did make one significant mistake with MobileCare, which meant the project almost did not get off the ground. “Because we felt the system was such a good idea we developed it before approaching any potential customers,” says Karsten. “However once we did we found that the incumbent healthcare management system suppliers were not willing to open their systems so MobileCare could interface with the schedule and journal information.” Fortunately Excitor were able to forge a deal with Zealand Care one of the youngest supplier in the market which now sees Zealand Care marketing MobileCare in Denmark.

Having successfully built a partnership in Denmark this is an approach Excitor is now using to explore overseas markets, initially in US, UK, France, Germany, Norway and Sweden. “For a small company like ourselves partnerships are really the only practical way to enter new markets, we simply don’t have the equity to support creating our own international sales force,” says Karsten. It is in forging these new partnerships that Forum Nokia PRO has been most useful to Excitor.

More information on MobileCare can be found on Excitor web site: www.excitor.dk.