An aged homecare supporting system in rural areas

We developed a. system which helps visiting nurses engaged in aged homecare services in rural areas. Typically in a rural area, depopulation has severely grown since young people have gone to cities, and thus only a few people who can work for aged homecare remains. Naturally, visiting nurses cannot visit each people frequently (it is possibly once a. week or so), and hence the problem arises that visiting nurses can hardly get hold of the daily health condition of each aged person to keep their health good. To support the visiting nurses, our system supplies helpful knowledge of the daily health condition of the aged people which is input by aged people by themselves. Concretely, in our system, aged people answer the basic questions every day using Internet terminals settled in their own houses, and visiting nurses refer the answers using their personal computers at the health center. In developing the system, the main difficulty is that the operation of the complicated Internet terminals is too stressful for aged people. In order to reduce the stress of aged people, we improve our system in the following three points: (i) We. use the simple and easy-to-operate Internet terminals provided for L-mode (which is a telephone-based Web access service provided by NTT corporation in Japan), (ii) reduce the number of questions for aged people to answer, and (iii) design easy-to-operate user interfaces. We. performed a test operation in our model-area called Hanazono village, and evaluate the effectiveness of our system.