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This paper aims to construct a recognition system of nursing activities.

The authors used accelerometers and radio frequency identification (RFID) tags to ensure patient privacy in practical nursing care environments. The accelerometers were attached to the body of the nurse, and the RFID was attached to apparatuses and objects. In addition, a pattern classification algorithm using a support vector machine and filtering methodology were applied.

The accuracy using accelerometers and RFID was 73 percent. When the filtering algorithm was applied, the results were 79 percent. The results showed that activities with short execution times or those that resembled others in posture had low recognition accuracy.

Activities requiring only a short period of time tend to be misrecognized.

It is possible to construct a training system for nursing activities with the system that recognizes the sequence of nursing activities and how much time is spent for individual activities.

The originality of the paper is to construct the system that considers the following characteristics of nursing activities: about 13 activities that are fundamental for nurses can be recognized, privacy of the patient is considered, several activities utilizing only part of the body (not whole body) can be recognized, and activities involving and not involving some types of apparatus can be recognized.

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.