A study on development of a home health care support information system.

As the need for home health care has been increasing with the rising number of the elderly in Japan, the application of medical informatics to home health care delivery is considered to be useful. Therefore, development of a home health care support information system was planned. The system can collect patient's PHD (Personal Health Data) such as data of ECG, complaints, etc. at patient's home and can send the PHD to medical facilities. We designed and constructed two subsystems on a trial basis. One subsystem has function of gathering, recording and transmitting vital signs of the aged such as ECG, physical activity rate, oxygen saturation rate in arterial blood. Another subsystem can collect and send image data of the old people at their home. Experiments for trial use of the system was conducted and it was recognized that the PHD can be smoothly collected and recorded at home of the elderly and can be sent to the medical facilities with good success by using the system.