Abstract
In April, 2008, Japanese government obliged health insurers to conduct the specific health checkup and instruction project focused on prevention of metabolic syndrome. Then, we constructed a health instruction support system as a tool for supporting the specific instruction by which a patient with metabolic syndrome can electronically record his daily-life information and physicians, health nurses or dietitians can the instruction. For the system construction, a management support system for patients with diabetes mellitus at home with a personal digital assistant (PDA) developed by us was improved. The health instruction support system has an easy menu selection method by button operation and a function of food model reference by which the standard of quantity of foods can be visually grasped. We added an automatic calculation function of a total amount of calorie intake to the system.
It is necessary that we investigate whether the system is suitable for a health instruction support tool to prevent metabolic syndrome or not. Therefore, a questionnaire survey for evaluation of the system in which staffs of Department of Prevention Cardiology National Cardiovascular Center were chosen as the subjects was conducted in the present study. As a result, it was suggested that the function of food model reference is useful for elevating consciousness of food intake by comparing the quantity of foods as the visual information and an appropriate method for menu selection brings improvement of usability of the information input. This system has not been operated yet. However, from the hearing to specialists, it is expected that the developed system might be useful for the support of providing the health instruction services by physicians, health nurses or dietitians if the problems are solved.
