Translational Acceleration, Rotational Speed, and Joint Angle of Patients Related to Correct/Incorrect Methods of Transfer Skills by Nurses

Abstract

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.

Development and Validation of Robot Patient Equipped with an Inertial Measurement Unit and Angular Position Sensors to Evaluate Transfer Skills of Nurses

“…Results show that the parameter values measured by the robot patient indicate significant differences in nine of the thirteen incorrect methods of the transfer skill in terms of the effects on the robot patient. Moreover, a comparison with [35] showed that, during most steps, the effects on the robot patient were identical to the effects on the SPs portrayed by nursing teachers.…”

“…To evaluate the transfer skill, Lin et al [35] proposed a checklist to transfer a patient suffering from weak lower limbs. The checklist includes both correct and incorrect methods, which were determined based on discussions with nursing teachers and reviews of nursing materials, as presented in Fig.…”

“…Also the HPS is usually equipped with sensors to measure movement to convey the condition of the patient. Meanwhile, one of our early studies [35] demonstrated that nursing skills can be indirectly evaluated using only patient movements. Therefore, we intend to use movements measured by sensors on a robot patient to assess nursing skills, as shown in Fig.…”

“…Limiting the number of sensors installed on the robot is preferable because this simplifies hardware development. Therefore, we analyzed the results of a previous study conducted with an SP [35], by examining the level of significant differences, to narrow the data to the parameters: the translational acceleration of the waist, rotational speed of the chest, and joint angles of the shoulder, hip, and knee. Further, we improved the robot patient reported in [32] by installing an inertial measurement unit (IMU) and angular Fig.…”

“…The main contribution of this study is to introduce the assessment method we proposed in our preliminary work [35] on a robot patient. To achieve this, the number of parameters that were measured was first reduced by avoiding the installation of redundant sensors on the robot.…”