With the outbreak of COVID-19, medical institutions are required to take various measures to deal with the increasing number of infected patients and their serious illnesses. Under the strengthening of the healthcare delivery system, some university courses for nurses and other healthcare professionals include on-site practical training. Many hospitals and facilities have stopped accepting trainees, leading to a lack of experience and anxiety about employment because face-to-face training, which can be considered preparation for on-site training, is different from previous years. Therefore, we examined the characteristics of the elderly who take on educational roles as mock patients and mock caregivers, and clarified the changes before and after taking on these educational roles. After completing the educational role, they were asked to complete a self-administered questionnaire with the same content as immediately after obtaining consent. For active seniors, taking on an educational role is a means of helping others and not overcoming their own challenges, so there is no sense of accomplishment or fulfillment after taking on the role, and it is thought that it does not affect self-esteem or quality of life.

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 “All blood, body fluids, secretions （sputum), vomitus, excreta, and wound skin and mucous membranes should be treated as sources of infection” represents the basis of infection control. However, previous studies have reported a low rate of compliance with personal protective equipment (aprons and goggles) use among nurses during oral care interventions. In this study, we investigated factors associated with low compliance with personal protective equipment use among nurses during oral care interventions.
 Our results showed that the rate of apron/goggle use was particularly low during oral care interventions, which was consistent with the results of previous studies. This finding was attributable to the possibility that nurses made their own decisions regarding selection and use of personal protective equipment during brushing performed as a component of oral care, based on the reasoning that droplets or spray would not splatter on the face or that they would use aprons and goggles only during interactions with patients diagnosed with an infection. It was also possible that nurses may have selected personal protective equipment based on color, depending on how each nurse received it and the contamination situation. Droplets and aerosols generated during most oral care procedures are ‘colorless' and ‘transparent' and are not perceived as ‘risky.’ Therefore, education is important to create awareness regarding splashing of droplets and aerosols during oral care interventions in addition to visual display of such information.

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The Japan Hospital Association launched the QI project in fiscal year 2011 with the aim of improving the quality of medical care at member hospitals. This study aimed to identify quality indicators of medical care that continuously affect inpatient satisfaction using data from the QI project. The study included 91 facilities that had participated continuously for four years from fiscal year 2018 to 2021, measuring 12 indicators, including inpatient satisfaction, incidence of inpatient falls, incidence of pressure ulcer, and the proportion of patients who received early rehabilitation after stroke. The analysis method used multiple regression analysis with inpatient satisfaction (satisfied + somewhat satisfied) as the dependent variable and the selected 12 indicators as independent variables. As a result, a correlation was shown between inpatient satisfaction and incidence of inpatient falls for all four years from fiscal year 2018 to 2021, and it was revealed that the incidence of inpatient falls affected inpatient satisfaction.

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This study aimed to eliminate "occupational back pain," one of the factors that causes nurses to take time off or quit their jobs, by using a portable posture measurement device that can be worn at all times during daily work, detecting dangerous forward leaning and twisting postures in real time, and sounding an alarm. We investigated the influence of a system that allows nurses to objectively assess their own posture on posture improvement. Five nurses performed the two-person bed-making procedure without a warning tone, the same procedure again after confirming the feedback, and finally the procedure with a warning tone after confirming the feedback. The results showed that feedback alone did not improve the forward lean angle, but the combined use of feedback and warning sound showed some improvement, although there were individual differences.

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In this research, healthcare software for multiple people is studied. Healthcare software gives appropriate advices based on personal health states. In previous research, probability of staying in objective states is maximized for one person. This research targets two problem settings and two rewards. In the first problem setting, one common advice is selected for multiple managed people. In the second problem setting, one advice is selected for each managed person. The first reward represents the sum of the probabilities that each managed person stays in the objective states. The second reward represents the probability that all managed people stay in the objective states at the same time. A new advice selection method is proposed for each couple of problem setting and reward. The proposed methods maximize expected rewards based on statistical decision theory by dynamic programming. The effectiveness of the proposed methods is shown by some computational examples. In the computational results, adaptive advice selection examples for each couple of problem setting and reward are confirmed. This research is basic research, and future extended research is required.

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There is a lot of previous research on profit maximization in agriculture. In a previous research, crop rotation problem and cultivation management problem are solved as one integrated management problem in order to maximize the profit in agriculture. Decisions are often made under cost constraints in real agricultural management. But in the previous research, decisions are made without cost constraints. In this research, cost constrained integrated management is studied. A new integrated management method considering cost constraints is proposed. Cost constrained integrated management problem is modeled by Markov decision processes. The proposed method maximizes the expected profit under cost constraints by dynamic programming. In the numerical calculation results, adaptive crop selection examples and cultivation action selection examples under cost constraints are confirmed. This research is basic research, and future extended research is required. For example, as a more realistic problem setting, the cost constrained integrated management problem for multiple farms is interesting.

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We propose a method for the facial asymmetry analysis using a video image of 3D point cloud. First, we describe how to create pseudo video image. Secondly, we evaluate the asymmetry in two ways. One is the analysis based on the temporal changes of the face landmarks obtained by the matching process, which evaluates how asymmetrical the lip movement is. In the matching process, face landmarks in different frames are corresponded by comparing FPFH values. The other is the analysis based on the center of gravity, which evaluates how asymmetrical the lip shape is. We applied our method to ten pseudo video images. As an experimental result, it is shown that our method can match face landmarks with higher accuracy and the result of the asymmetry analysis does not contradict our sense.

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The purpose of this experiment is to investigate the influence of the direction of sight on the construction of the cognitive map. Specifically, we investigated the effect of direction of sight on cognitive maps by quantifying the accuracy of cognitive maps and scene memories when the direction of sight coincided with the direction of movement and when it did not, and by comparing and analyzing these results. In the experiment, subjects were first presented with a 13-minute drive recorder image of a leftward or forward view, and then asked to draw a map (cognitive map). Next, subjects were presented with an image of a landmark and asked to answer whether the landmark was present in the video or not (location recognition). Comparing the average correct response rates for leftward and forward sightline path changes on the generated route maps, we confirmed that the correct response rate for forward sightline path changes was about 30% higher than that for leftward sightline path changes, a significant difference. In the location recognition experiment, there was no significant difference in the correct recognition rate between leftward and forward sightlines, with an average of about 70%.

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  In this paper, we investigate a method for detecting impersonation by continuously authenticating the individual without stressing the user after authentication using IDs and passwords. As a method to prevent the occurrence of fraud by spoofing, this paper reports the results of a study of an identity authentication method that uses keystroke timing and sound based on keystroke information at the time of document creation.
 The authentication experiments were conducted by changing the keystroke timing by making the user aware of the keystroke timing in the measurement conditions. Authentication experiments were conducted using the three keystroke sounds that are characteristic of Japanese input: “conversion”, “confirmation” and “newline”. The authentication success rate of the authentication experiment using keystrokes was 63%, and the authentication success rate of the experiment using keystroke sounds was 79%. We think that this method is sufficient as a stand-alone authentication method, and we will continue our research for multimodal authentication using features obtained from keystroke information.

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