Abstract
As the world’s population of senior citizens continues to grow, the burden on the professionals who care for them (carers) is also increasing. In nursing homes, carers often write daily reports to improve the resident’s quality of life. However, since each carer needs to simultaneously care for multiple residents, they have difficulty thoroughly recording the activities of residents. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing an automatic daily report generation system that monitors the activities of nursing home residents. The proposed system estimates the multiple locations (areas) at which residents are situated with a BLE beacon, using a variety of methods to analyze the RSSI values of BLE signals, and recognizes the activity of each resident from the estimated area information. The information of the estimated activity of residents is stored in a server with timestamps, and the server automatically generates daily reports based on them. To show the effectiveness of the proposed system, we conducted an experiment for five days with four participants in cooperation with an actual nursing home. We determined the proposed system’s effectiveness with the following four evaluations: (1) comparison of performance of different machine-learning algorithms, (2) comparison of smoothing methods, (3) comparison of time windows, and (4) evaluation of generated daily reports. Our evaluations show the most effective combination pattern among 156 patterns to accurately generate daily reports. We conclude that the proposed system has high effectiveness, high usability, and high flexibility.
Highlights
In recent years, due to the astonishing progress of medical technology, human life expectancy has shown a consistent tendency to increase [1]
We evaluated the performance of two kinds of smoothing methods and determined the most effective one by adapting the smoothing methods to the machinelearning algorithm for the classification determined in evaluation (a)
We evaluated the effectiveness of our proposed system by comparing the daily reports generated by the groundtruth data and by the final combination patterns determined by Section 5.3
Summary
Due to the astonishing progress of medical technology, human life expectancy has shown a consistent tendency to increase [1]. Japan has one of the world’s highest life-expectancy rates, and a quarter of its people are over 65. Such aging societies pose many problems for society. One critical problem is the increase of the burden on carers in nursing homes, who are responsible for multiple elderly people, that is, nursing home residents. They have to write daily reports (that record some primary resident activities) that are used by the government to determine funding for nursing homes. The situation degrades the service quality, since the carers must prepare daily reports on multiple residents, which disrupt other tasks
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