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The purpose of this paper is to describe the relationship between job stress, stress coping ability and performance among Japanese nurses.

Health risk and organization environment as job stress factors, sense of coherence (SOC) as stress coping ability and medical risk indicator and sickness‐absence days as a performance proxy were used to investigate the relationship between stress and performance. Length of professional experience also was included in the investigation.

The findings suggest a possibility that enriching nurses' professional experiences reduces medical risk. There is also a possibility that raising the SOC, while improving organization environment, contributes to reducing sickness‐absence.

A cross‐sectional study of nurses in a single institution was used. In order to generalize the study's results, it will be necessary to conduct multi‐institutional longitudinal studies.

The present study shows key factors affecting medical risk and sickness‐absence leading to a reduced nursing performance.

The authors develop a program, named eBraille, to translate Japanese text into braille and thereby generate braille documents easily. Public access to this program is provided to anyone via the Internet. The paper aims to evaluate the translation accuracy of the eBraille program.

eBraille is a CGI program that is accessible via a web browser. The core of the program is a braille translating engine called the Kobe University Intelligent Braille Engine for ChaSen (KUIC). It is based on Japanese Braille Transcription Rules (Japanese Braille Committee, 2001). To evaluate the translation accuracy of eBraille, a corpus was utilized that was created from ordinary text and braille newspaper articles.

The paper finds that eBraille translation accuracy is equivalent to or better than that of other stand‐alone braille translation programs. This result suggests that the program achieved the goal of being applicable for practical use. In addition, the program is utilized to make Kobe University Hospital brochures in braille for outpatients and inpatients. The brochures are available in the hospital and are favorably accepted by the blind and the visually impaired. This result suggests that the translation program can facilitate accessibility to information for patients.

The braille translation program is based on a client‐server system and is architecture‐independent. Moreover, it is a free system for creating braille text files for anyone who has access to a web browser.

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.

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.

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.

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.