Multi-agent Simulation of Excretion Care Processes in Day-service Facilities

Abstract

The Government of Japan has taken several measures to secure human resources for long-term care, includingimproving work efficiency by care workers, improving a working environment, and providing effective training fornew employees. However, there are major barriers in resolving the issues, such as difficulties in public surveys due toa variety of situations involving personal data in long-term care facilities, and difficulties in quantifying informationand features on care workers and care receivers in actual nursing care processes. In this research, specifically focusingon excretion care, which is regarded to be a particularly high burden on care workers, we newly construct a virtualnursing care process simulator based on a multi-agent model. At first applying it to simulate care processes in anactual day-service facility, we have confirmed that the simulated results agree with observed ones reasonably well.Next, we evaluated the work efficiency of care workers quantitatively, parametrically varying the number of elderlypeople and that of care workers. As the results, it is confirmed that the total amount of assistance by care workersincreases as the number of elderly people increases, and that the work time per care worker decreases as the numberof care workers increases. We can conclude that such a simulation-based approach will be a powerful tool to discussissues on nursing care processes quantitatively and to search for new solutions.