To understand why mobile applications are needed for nursing students, we need to understand their difficulties and some existing facts and problems nowadays. As one of the professional occupations, public expectations for the nursing students and nurses are much higher that other jobs. According to studies from National Union of Nurses Associations and Taiwan Hospital Reform Foundation (THRF) in 2006, one nurse is required to take care of three patients on average. The number should higher than that in other advanced countries.

The following shows the most common difficulties that they face:

• Students or nurse may not able to distinguish the clinical problems and to determine the situation is urgent or not.
• If the information is complex, the amount of information is large or the under the time pressure, new graduated students will tend to make errors or wrong decisions.
• Difficult to remember the professional terms, knowledge and the name of drugs.
• Lack of adaptability to adapt the working environments.
• Difficult and not convenience to find out the needed information.
• Difficult to handle many requests by patients at the same time.

To develop a most suitable application for nursing students and nurses in learning and problem solving, I have searched around 200 mobile applications in Android version and found out 50 most related in different aspect such as drug or health care in the Android market to see what the functions they have and the functions they have can completely suit the needs of nursing students or not. After my observations and trying, I discover that these applications contain some problems which make them become fewer users friendly:

• These applications only focused on some aspects such as glossary or symptoms classification, they are lacking of integration and only can fulfill part of the students' needs. Students or nurses may require downloading many applications from time to time to suit their needs.
• Some of these applications are trial version only, users need to pay over a period of time if they want to use more functions.
• These applications are all in English version. It is not user friendly enough for Hong Kong people to use.
• The information contained in the application may not fully useable for students or nurses in Hong Kong with different aspects.
• These applications are not extensible and changeable, so users cannot enter what they want to suit their needs.

The following describes the main requirements, which are mainly concerned with glossary function as below:

• It should be the vocabulary about nursing. It should be used by students without network connection.
• It should be able for students to search and get the vocabularies in Chinese and English.
• Inside the glossary function, it should contain some images, videos and pronunciation about the vocabularies.
• It is better to allow students to search from the internet via the application directly.

This system architecture mainly contains three parts: “Learning and Practicum”, “Useful Tools” and “Instructions and Setting”. The usages of different parts are:

Learning and Practicum

This part mainly contains some functions for nursing students to learn and to provide some quick references in order to enhance their abilities on problems solving.

Useful Tools

This part provides some tools to assist nursing students in different ways under the clinical environment in order to facilitate their works and ensure the accuracy of their decisions. Also, it contains some supplementary functions to enrich the usage of glossary function.

Instructions and Setting

It goes without saying that it contains some instructions for nursing students if they don't know how to use this application. On the other hand, they can select the knowledge of this application in this part.

The system contains both online and local parts with the architecture as follows: