2024 Volume 55 Issue 2 Pages 16-23
In 2025, about 380,000 caregivers are to be in short supply. One of the factors behind this shortage is early turnover due to physical diseases such as back pain. In the transfer assistance, supporting the weight of the person to be cared when standing up from a bed or wheelchair or sitting is an important issue. It is necessary to reduce the labor burden on caregivers by introducing care support devices such as nursing robots. In this study, as one method to solve these problems, “Active air pad for nursing care” is developed and verified the performance and the effectiveness, which is applying the principle of an air jack in order to assist the lifting operation of a to be cared person for the transfer work and so on. Further, to evaluate the usefulness of the developed active air pad, a survey at some nursing care facilities is conducted. The caregivers perceived its effectiveness and pointed out some issues for the practical applications in the care facilities, for example, simplifying operation, reducing size and so on. This paper describes the fundamental performance and the control method of the prototype devices, and summarizes the questionnaire for demonstration tests conducted in the nursing care facilities for the introduction of care support device into the care nursing.
