Abstract
A handover support system that supports care workers to share information and knowledge on patients and nursing-care work based on information recommendation is described. A handover is time consuming work because it takes much time to write and retrieve information on patients. We investigated the handover work in a nursing home, and found that about 25% of the work time was spent for sharing information among care workers. The aim of this study is to support care workers to share handover information efficiently.For this aim, we propose a novel handover support system called DANCE (Dynamic Action and kNowledge assistant for Collaborative sErvice fields) that supports care workers to share information and knowledge on patients and nursing-care work based on information recommendation. The system has following functions; (1) a function for recommending handover information based on attribute names and their values, (2) a function for recommending free-text contents of handover information, and (3) a function for sharing multimedia information. We had experiments for evaluating effectiveness of the system, and confirmed that the system can reduce the time for sharing handover information through a day compared to the time based on a notebook. We compared the work time for sharing two types of handover infomation between the system and notebook conditions; (a) information on patients and nursing-care work which is stored as pairs of attribute names and their values, (b) free-text contents on patients. Results of experiments revealed that the system can reduce the time for the former type of information as 55.2% (64.0s) per person a day compared to the notebook condition, and 59.0% (200s) for the latter type of information. An overview of the system and results of experiments are described.
