Assessment of basic nursing skills by activity based on wearable camera video: Comparison between expert and novice nurses in bed-making

Abstract

　Purpose: This study aims to assess video-based activity (hereinafter referred to as“video activity”) and acceleration for bed-making techniques simultaneously and compare the differences between expert and novice participants. It also investigates the characteristics of video activity. Methods: An expert nurse (nursing faculty member) and three novices (nursing students) were included in the study. The subjects used a wearable camera and smartphone on their chest and were asked to perform bed-making. Optical flow was used to calculate the video activity. Results: Video activity and acceleration were lower in skilled participants, and work time was shorter in the expert participant. The entropy of video activity and acceleration was the lowest for the expert participant, and a level of proficiency was exhibited by the novice participants. Conclusion: The values calculated from video activity and acceleration differed between expert and novice participants. It was suggested that this could be used as an indicator of proficiency in nursing techniques.