Hiroshi Inada

Development of a Health Management Support System for Patients with Diabetes Mellitus at Home

Recently, a patient with diabetes mellitus (DM) type 2 has been increasing in Japan. The patient should be managed not only by a specialist but also by himself focusing his attention on the improvement of his lifestyle at home. In the present study, we tried to develop a health management support system by which a diabetic patient in early stage can easily enter his daily life information, i.e. the biological information such as the data of blood sugar levels and blood pressure levels etc., the information of exercise and diet and send the information to the medical institution with a personal digital assistant (PDA). Afterwards, the patient can receive health instruction information by the physician in charge for self-care at his home with a PDA. The daily life information sent from the patient is stored in a server installed at the medical institution and analyzed. The physician can obtain the results of analysis by using a PC and send the instruction information necessary for patient management to the patient at home by using e-mail after diagnosing the patient’s condition by the system. To evaluate usability of the developed patient information input system with a PDA, an experiment was conducted by corporation of 20 volunteers who were possible self management and whose age’s range from 20s to 60s by questionnaire survey. As a result, almost examinees answered that lifestyle information could be easily entered by the sense like a mobile-phone and lots of positive opinions were obtained.

A Basic Study on Application of Voice Recognition Input to an Electronic Nursing Record System -Evaluation of the Function as an Input Interface-

As computerization in the nursing field has been recently progressing, an electronic nursing record system is gradually introduced in the medical institution in Japan. Although it is expected for the electronic nursing record system to reduce the load of nursing work, the conventional keyboard operation is used for information input of the present electronic nursing record system and it has some problems concerning the input time and the operationability for common nurses who are unfamiliar with the computer operation. In the present study, we conducted a basic study on application of voice recognition input to an electronic nursing record system. The voice input is recently introduced to an electronic medical record system in a few clinics. However, so far the entered information cannot be processed because the information of the medical record must be entered as a free sentence. Therefore, we contrived a template for an electronic nursing record system and introduced it to the system for simple information entry and easy processing of the entered information in this study. Furthermore, an input experiment for evaluation of the voice input with the template was carried out by voluntary subjects for evaluation of the function as an input interface of an electronic nursing record system. The results of the experiment revealed that the input time by the voice input is obviously fast compared with that by the keyboard input and operationability of the voice input was superior to the keyboard input although all subjects had inexperience of the voice input. As a result, it was suggested our method, the voice input using the template made by us, might be useful for an input interface of an electronic nursing record system.

EEG Activities Evoked by Trauma Stimuli Related to Earthquakes and Personality Features Associated with Trauma

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate whether traumatic symptoms and personality stability can affect brain reactions evoked by earthquake traumatic stimuli or not. Posttratunatic stress disorder (PTSD) has been noticed in Japan since The Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake in 1995. The personality stability of 22 healthy subjects was assessed, and the subjects were categorized into two groups: complaint (+) and complaint (–) in the Trauma-Finding Questionnaire (TFQ)/the mentally stable group (M-S) and the mentally unstable group (M-US) in the Yatabe-Guilford Personality (Y-G test). An EEG was measured during resting and under tasks related to fear from earthquakes in the `quake session or generally unpleasant feelings in the `fear session. The results show that the power spectra values of complaint (+) and M-US in the quake and fear sessions were significantly larger than those in the resting session. These events suggest that traumatic stimuli can provoke not only emotional reactions, but also...

An online support system for promotion of a behavior change for persons with metabolic syndrome

The World Health Organization reported that ischemic heart disease is the most common cause of death worldwide in 2008. The main causes of ischemic heart disease are obesity, hypertension, arteriosclerosis and other metabolic abnormalities. These conditions are related to lifestyle issues, such as diet and exercise. We developed a system to support the self-management of patients using a personal digital assistant (PDA). However, diet management becomes more difficult as patient condition worsens. Both self-management and behavior change by persons with metabolic syndrome are needed to prevent ischemic heart disease. In the present study, we have improved the system to support behavior change in persons with metabolic syndrome. The system has three functions of an entry of users lifestyle information, a calculation of total amount of calorie intake and a reference to food model pictures of 80 kcal standard quantities for the behavior change. We focused on a self-review of user lifestyle as the first step of the behavior change. We conducted an experiment with the cooperation of 14 medical staff members to verify the operability of the system. No serious problems with the system were encountered. Additionally, we tested the system with health checkup examinees. The results of these tests suggested that our system will help physicians provide advice regarding total amount of calorie intake to health checkup examinees.

An analysis of frequency components of shunt murmur for diagnosing shunt stenoses in hemodialysis

Auscultation of shunt murmur is a non-invasive technique to dianose shunt stenoses in hemodialysis therapy and it is the most popular method for daily shunt administration of hemodialysis patients. From the clinical experience, high frequency components of the shunt murmur are observed when a shunt has one or more stenoses. However, this method has not been established as the objective diagnosis standard. Therefore, we tried to analyze the correlation between stenosis levels and frequency components of the shunt murmur for the basic study to establish the objective diagnosis standard of the shunt stenosis by the shunt murmur. For the purpose of this study, the frequency characteristics of some shunt murmur samples recorded at three locations of an arterio-venous fistura (AVF) were analyzed by using discrete wavelet transformation at the beginning. Secondly, we conducted a significant difference test of average values of correlation coefficients between stenosis levels. The experimental results revealed that we could observe the significant differences of frequency levels of the shunt murmur between stenosis levels especially at the anastomosis spot and the stenosis spot of the shunt, while the significant differences could not be observed at the down stream of the stenosis spot.

Feasibility for the enhancement of an online support system for persons with metabolic syndrome, aimed at applications for ischemic heart disease and heart failure

Previously, we developed of an online support system for persons with metabolic syndrome. In this study, we investigated the possibility of enhancing our system for applications in ischemic heart disease (IHD) and heart failure (HF). The main causes of IHD are obesity, hypertension, arteriosclerosis, hyperglycemia and other metabolic disorders. These conditions are related to lifestyle issues, such as diet and exercise. Dietary management becomes more difficult as the patients condition worsens. We primarily focused on behavior changes. To raise the users awareness of food intake, we improved a number of functions of the developed system: an entry of the users lifestyle information, a calculation of the total calorie intake and a reference of food model pictures in 80 kcal standard quantities. IHD encompasses many of the causes of HF. Management tools appropriate for HF are few. We describe the main functions of our system and promote self-management as a requirement for IHD and HF. We expect that the framework of our system is applicable to the management of patients with chronic HF.

Development of a Home-Based Support System for Diabetic Patients

It is necessary for patients with diabetes mellitus (DM) to correctly interpret blood sugar levels from self-monitoring of blood glucose, to properly manage their blood sugar and to follow the medical advice of their physician. Accordingly, we developed a home-based support system for diabetic patients by which the patient can record his medical data and send the information to a medical institution using an Android smartphone. The patients can view various pieces of information such as prescription information with a smartphone. We anticipate that our newly developed system will be useful in supporting patients with DM at home.

Development of a support system for diabetic patients at home using a smartphone

Recently, the number of patients with diabetes mellitus (DM) has been increasing. Because DM causes many complications, it is important for patients with DM to control their blood sugar levels. However, there is not an effective method for the patients to manage their blood sugar levels at home. Therefore, we developed a home support system for the patients by which the patient can accumulate various biological measured data and send the data to a medical institution. At the institution, a physician can check the data and provide instructions via e-mail to the patient at home. The system is composed of a smartphone used by the patient, a server installed at the medical institution and a personal computer (PC) used by the physician. The patient measures data such as weight, blood pressure, blood sugar, etc. at home and send these data to the server using the smartphone. The physician can check the patient data, including a medical and medication history, and provide instructions via e-mail to the patient using the PC. For our purpose, an Android smartphone was selected as a terminal, and the system was created using XML so that the data could be read with a web browser in any environment. We anticipate our developed system will be useful to support patients with DM at home.

A High-Speed Drug Interaction Search System for Ease of Use in the Clinical Environment

With the advancement of pharmaceutical development, drug interactions have become increasingly complex. As a result, a computer-based drug interaction search system is required to organize the whole of drug interaction data. To overcome problems faced with the existing systems, we developed a drug interaction search system using a hash table, which offers higher processing speeds and easier maintenance operations compared with relational databases (RDB). In order to compare the performance of our system and MySQL RDB in terms of search speed, drug interaction searches were repeated for all 45 possible combinations of two out of a group of 10 drugs for two cases: 5,604 and 56,040 drug interaction data. As the principal result, our system was able to process the search approximately 19 times faster than the system using the MySQL RDB. Our system also has several other merits such as that drug interaction data can be created in comma-separated value (CSV) format, thereby facilitating data maintenance. Although our system uses the well-known method of a hash table, it is expected to resolve problems common to existing systems and to be an effective system that enables the safe management of drugs.

Development of "Cardiac Arrhythmia Risk Evaluation" System Based on Computer Simulation

We developed an experimental system of Cardiac Arrhythmia Risk Evaluation (CARE) based on electrophysiological computer simulation. The system can evaluate a risk of tachyarrhythmia by the electrophysiological simulation with premature stimulation to many sites in the ventricular model, and users can browse the results on the Web page with the visualized data. The system is expected to be useful to assist the prevention and treatment for tachyarrhythmia.