A basic study on application of voice recognition input to an electronic nursing record system -evaluation of the function as an input interface-.

As computerization in the nursing field has been recently progressing, an electronic nursing record system is gradually introduced in the medical institution in Japan. Although it is expected for the electronic nursing record system to reduce the load of nursing work, the conventional keyboard operation is used for information input of the present electronic nursing record system and it has some problems concerning the input time and the operationability for common nurses who are unfamiliar with the computer operation. In the present study, we conducted a basic study on application of voice recognition input to an electronic nursing record system. The voice input is recently introduced to an electronic medical record system in a few clinics. However, so far the entered information cannot be processed because the information of the medical record must be entered as a free sentence. Therefore, we contrived a template for an electronic nursing record system and introduced it to the system for simple information entry and easy processing of the entered information in this study. Furthermore, an input experiment for evaluation of the voice input with the template was carried out by voluntary subjects for evaluation of the function as an input interface of an electronic nursing record system. The results of the experiment revealed that the input time by the voice input is obviously fast compared with that by the keyboard input and operationability of the voice input was superior to the keyboard input although all subjects had inexperience of the voice input. As a result, it was suggested our method, the voice input using the template made by us, might be useful for an input interface of an electronic nursing record system.

Development of a health management support system for patients with diabetes mellitus at home.

Recently, a patient with diabetes mellitus (DM) type 2 has been increasing in Japan. The patient should be managed not only by a specialist but also by himself focusing his attention on the improvement of his lifestyle at home. In the present study, we tried to develop a health management support system by which a diabetic patient in early stage can easily enter his daily life information, i.e. the biological information such as the data of blood sugar levels and blood pressure levels etc., the information of exercise and diet and send the information to the medical institution with a personal digital assistant (PDA). Afterwards, the patient can receive health instruction information by the physician in charge for self-care at his home with a PDA. The daily life information sent from the patient is stored in a server installed at the medical institution and analyzed. The physician can obtain the results of analysis by using a PC and send the instruction information necessary for patient management to the patient at home by using e-mail after diagnosing the patient's condition by the system. To evaluate usability of the developed patient information input system with a PDA, an experiment was conducted by corporation of 20 volunteers who were possible self management and whose age's range from 20s to 60s by questionnaire survey. As a result, almost examinees answered that lifestyle information could be easily entered by the sense like a mobile-phone and lots of positive opinions were obtained.

Construction of a safety management system for drug use by using an RFID tag.

We constructed a safety management system for narcotic drug use by using an RFID tag with barcode. In this system, RFID tags are mainly used for postscript of information, while barcodes, especially standardized unit drug codes for distribution, are used for drug identification. The outline of the system is described in the present paper.