Free handwriting in home-care workers support system using personal digital assistants

In Japan, infrastructure for home care services is being built for the future aging society. To ensure ideal home care, however, we further need to establish a social system in which home care providers, including physicians, home visiting nurses and homehelpers, coordinate with each other. Given this background, we have proposed a home care workers support system using personal digital assistants (PDAs) "ALWAYS" that supports care providers' work and communication, and, as a first step, have developed a prototype of a visiting nurse station support system (M. Kondo and T. Suzuki). The paper describes the system's input/output and also presents the results of a field test. In this system, high controllability is ensured, and therefore care providers find the use of PDAs comfortable. PDAs are used to enter patient records by free handwriting employing a "problem oriented medical record" (POMR) which is adapted to the staffs' work. The records can be sorted and printed out in a list form for the evaluation of the care. The results of our field test have shown that this prototype improves the quality of nursing care as well as the efficiency of routine work. We expect that this system concept is also applicable to other care workers like hospital nurses, homehelpers, and so on.