Taiki Ogata, Ayanori Nagata, Zhifeng Huang, Takahiro Katayama, Masako Kanai-Pak, Jukai Maeda, Yasuko Kitajima, Mitsuhiro Nakamura, Kyoko Aida, Noriaki Kuwahara and Jun Ota
For self-training of nursing students, this paper developed a mannequin to simulate and measure the movement of a patient’s arms while nurses changed the patient’s clothes on a…
Abstract
Purpose
For self-training of nursing students, this paper developed a mannequin to simulate and measure the movement of a patient’s arms while nurses changed the patient’s clothes on a bed. In addition, using the mannequin the purpose of this paper is to determine the difference in the handling of a patient’s arms between nursing teachers and students.
Design/methodology/approach
The target patient was an old man with complete paralysis. Three-degrees-of-freedom (DOF) shoulder joints and one-DOF elbow joints were applied to the mannequin. The angles of all joints were measured using a potentiometer, and those angles were transmitted to a computer via Bluetooth.
Findings
In a preliminary experiment, the two nursing teachers confirmed that the mannequin arms simulated the motion of the arms of a paralyzed patient. In the experiment, two teachers and six students changed the clothes of the mannequin. The average joint angle of the left elbow and the moving frequency of the left elbow, right shoulder adduction/abduction and right shoulder internal/external rotation were lower in the case of teachers dressing the mannequin than when students were dressing it.
Originality/value
The proposed system can simulate a completely paralyzed patient that nursing students would normally be almost unable to train with. Additionally, the proposed approach can reveal differences between skilled and non-skilled people in the treatment of a patient’s body.