E-nightingale Project

Abstract

We are conducting research on a knowledge sharing system that observes certain activities in our everyday life with ubiquitous sensors, interprets these activities, constructs knowledge such as the general tendencies of these activities from the interpretations, and provides useful knowledge to those developing improvements for the targeted activities.

Aim

Recently in Japan, disasters have occurred frequently in manufacturing plants. It has been pointed out that one of the major causes of these disasters is the fact that people working in job sites lack enough knowledge and experience. To solve this problem, we need the technology to capture expert’s everyday activities along with their surrounding situations, to understand these activities and situations, to transform this understanding into a form of knowledge that can be utilized effectively even by novices, and finally to provide this knowledge to the people who need it.

The technology described above should improve everyday activities not only in manufacturing but also in such fields as medical services, elderly care, emergency services, forfeiting, and policing, all of which require expertise. Among these fields, this project focuses on medical services because of their importance and the urgent need for such technology. The project has chosen nurses in medical institutions as intended users because they most often experience medical accidents and incidents.

By paying attention to the empirical knowledge of everyday activities in job sites, this project aims to establish the fundamental technology for a system that can help construct knowledge of everyday activities in job sites and then share this knowledge among the persons involved. This requires the following fundamental technologies:
・Capturing details of nurses’ everyday activities, along with their surrounding situations, which may have been overlooked previously, and understanding them;
・Constructing empirical knowledge of general tendencies, risks and so forth for these everyday activities; and
・Providing the persons involved with the appropriate empirical knowledge.

Technology

This project intends to develop the following three systems:

・Nursing duty record and analysis system;
・Just-in-time nursing advice system; and
・Accident/incident video documentation system.