This study investigated lifestyle changes and the self-reported mental health status of Japanese community residents during the COVID-19 pandemic. Differences in demography, daily lifestyle changes, and approaches to problem solving were analyzed in two age cohorts (<60 vs ≥60 years). The prevalence of moderate/increased psychological distress was 31.7%, with no significant difference between the cohorts. Compared with the pre-COVID-19 era, more than 80% of the participants stopped eating out and spent more time at home, and more than 70% used public transport less frequently. There were significant differences between the cohorts for the time spent at home, opportunities to eat meals outside of home, and shopping in stores. Participants aged under 60 years were less likely to use television and newspapers or to consult a family doctor. Those aged over 60 years were less likely to consult friends/ colleagues or to use the Internet/social networking services. Identifying the risk factors for psychological distress is warranted for implementing measures to maintain and improve the physical and mental health of residents.
In this paper, the authors present a framework for information sharing with privacy and priority control in long-term care designed to promote appropriate information sharing among the people who are involved in long-term care for provision of better care service. The authors' framework includes four agents (user agent, local information system access agent, authentication/access control agent and priority control agent) and two databases (user database and care record index database). The LIS (local information system) access agent creates and updates the care record index database, which act as an index when user agents try to access to care recipient's record, based on the Open Authentication protocol. It also acts as a query interface from each user agent. The authentication/access control agent allows sensitive information to be shared in accordance with the policy defined by care recipient. The priority control agent judges the urgency of the information for either periodic or immediate notification. The authors also propose an implementation of this framework using the Resource Description Framework Site Summary, and demonstrate how our framework works with the scenario of care recipient's unexpected injury. In summary, this framework is designed to help people who require long-term care and provides an effective system for each staff that is in charge of administering long-term care services. The authors' information sharing system incorporates a multi-agent architecture to facilitate information sharing and privacy/priority control. The authors believe that this research provides an important first step for researchers who intend to build a prototype to automate the processes of information sharing for long-term health care.
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