An application framework for developing collaborative handheld decision-making tools

This paper describes an application framework supporting collaborative handheld decision-making (CHDM). The main characteristics of the framework are: (1) extensive usage of visual elements and gestures; and (2) independence from specific decision-making methods, processes and tasks. The research departed from the analysis and systematisation of several CHDM scenarios, highlighting repeatable behaviour across multiple decision-making contexts. From these scenarios, we distilled a coherent set of common functional requirements organised in three main categories: process, macro- and micro-functionality. The proposed framework has been validated at length through the development of several CHDM tools. Six different tools are described in the paper. The main contribution of this work is a common foundation for developing CHDM tools.