Kentaro Torii

Modeling of complex processes in nursing and caregiving services

In 2010, JST/RISTEX in Japan started a new R&D program “Service Science, Solutions and Foundation Integrated Research Program”. The authors are engaged in a research project “Innovation for Service Space Communication by Voice Tweets in Nursing and Caring” selected by this program, and are developing a stress-free information assisting system based on smart voice messaging. By providing voice messaging environment optimized for current situation of nurses, the system helps nurses in their cooperation, knowledge sharing, and making work records, and as a result the system reduces various kinds of stresses associated with their work. To estimate the current situation of nurses, it is important to have detailed process models that describe working schedules and how they behave in various situations. Moreover, computer simulation based on the process models is useful for quantitative evaluation of the system. In this paper, we first analyze complex processes in nursing and caregiving services, and then propose a modeling architecture. An implementation based on object-oriented Petri nets is also presented.

Temporal–Spatial Collaboration Support for Nursing and Caregiving Services

An aging population is driving a tremendous need to improve both the efficiency and quality of nursing and caregiving. Toward this end, a collaboration support system would be useful because indirect operations such as recordkeeping and communication are a significant part of healthcare work. This chapter proposes an information supervisory control model for a collaboration support system targeted at nursing and caregiving service systems; furthermore, we have developed a smart voice messaging system based on this model. We then formulate hypotheses to be examined through field tests, virtual field tests, and simulation from the perspective of information supervisory control.

Improvement of Sharing of Observations and Awareness in Nursing and Caregiving by Voice Tweets

Nurses and caregivers provide care for patients using their hands and move around hospital wards, staff stations, operating rooms, residents’ rooms and so on. They also read and write, sending and receiving a lot of information of various types in the course of their work. Therefore, nursing and the provision of care could be described as “physical and adaptive intelligent services.” Several types of information systems and communication systems are used in “physical and adaptive intelligent services.” But there is a striking mismatch between “physical and adaptive intelligent services” and conventional information systems whose interfaces are generally designed for deskwork. The mismatch is one of the significant causes of the fact that the quality and efficiency of information processing in nursing has not been improved as much as people would expect. In this paper, we describe how a voice interface improves the quality of the information processing in nursing, focusing on care recording. The smart voice messaging system for nursing makes it possible for nurses to input care records, take notes for themselves, and organize voice messages to other staffs in a unified way during care. The experimental evaluation performed in a nursing home for the elderly shows that the smart voice messaging system can contribute to improvement in the quality of care because care staffs can easily retain various observations and concerns that are often lost in the case of conventional care records.

A Pilot Study in Using a Smart Voice Messaging System to Create a Reflection-in-Caregiving Workshop

This paper describes a pilot study in terms of reflection-in-caregiving with an assistive technology employing smart messaging by Bluetooth for location identification and annotation for tweets. We conducted 3 sorts of investigations i.e. questionnaire of role stress, semi-structured interview and reflection workshop to explore potential for inducing caregivers behavior change by the assistive technology. Thereafter, we concluded that the assistive technology shows the potential of reflection and behavior change.

Work and Speech Interactions among Staff at an Elderly Care Facility

We observed bathing assistance, night shift operations, and handover tasks at a private elderly care home for 8 days. We collected approximately 400 h of recorded speech, 42,000 transcribed utterances, data from an indoor location tracking system, and handwritten notes by human observers. We also analyzed speech interaction in the bathing assistance task. We found that (1) staff members are almost always speaking during tasks, (2) remote communication is rare, (3) about 75% of utterances are spoken to the residents, (4) the intended recipient of utterances is frequently switched, and (5) about 17% of utterances contain personal names. We also attempted clustering utterances into passages, and about 33% of passages contained only one person’s name. These results should be applicable in semi-automatic long-term care record taking.