Currently, due to shortages in the nursing faculty and low access to actual patients, it is difficult for students to receive feedback from teachers and practice with actual patients to obtain clinic experience. Thus, both evaluation systems and simulated patients have become urgent requirements. Accordingly, this study proposes a method to evaluate the nurse’s transfer skill through observation from the patient. After verifying the proposed method, it will be integrated with a robotic patient as a future work. To verify if such an evaluation is practical, a checklist comprising 16 steps with correct and incorrect methods was proposed by the nursing teachers. Further, the evaluation parameters were determined as translational acceleration, rotational speed, and joint angle of patient. Inertial sensors and motion capture were employed to measure the translational acceleration, rotational speed, and joint angle. An experiment was conducted with two nursing teachers, who were asked to carry out both correct and incorrect methods. According to the results, three parameters reveal the difference for a patient under correct/incorrect methods and can further be used to evaluate the nurse’s skill once the thresholds are determined. In addition, the applicability of inertial sensors is confirmed for the use of robot development.
To more efficiently enhance the patient transfer skills of nursing students, this study aims to integrate a transfer skills evaluation system and a robot patient. The evaluation parameters, namely, the translational acceleration of the waist, rotational speed of the chest, and joint angles of the shoulder, hip, and knee, were selected on the basis of the pre-experimental results obtained with a simulated patient acted by the human individuals. To measure these parameters, inertial measurement unit (IMU) and angular position sensors were installed on the robot patient. An experiment was conducted with four nursing teachers to verify whether the robot patient could distinguish the incorrect methods of the transfer skills, determined to be a common mistake made by the nurses. According to the results, most transfer steps had the same effect on the simulated patient and the robot patient, which demonstrates that the robot patient is a suitable substitute for an actual patient. However, in certain steps, the robot patient was not able to distinguish between the correct and incorrect methods using the chosen parameters owing to the differences being insignificant. These insignificant differences were mostly attributed to the passive joint design of the robot patient.
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