A study on home health care support information system for health evaluation

The need for home health care has been increasing in Japan and the application of various techniques such as medical informatics are desired to support home health care services. Therefore, we developed an information system for health evaluation of the elderly including patients at home by applying multifunctional telephone set and an IC memory card, by which complaints, symptoms, and conditions by them can be collected, recorded, and transmitted to medical facilities. We also conducted an experiment for trial use of the system with the cooperation of elderly female volunteers. It was recognized that the elderly volunteers could operate the system with the help of public health nurses and their health information could be collected by the system. Although the developed system has some problems, it was suggested that the system would be useful for the support of health evaluation of elderly at home.