Care support system linked with the latest network cameras to realize safe and secure living 24 hours a day, 365 days a year
Close monitoring system protects residents’ daily lives
Issues
Excellent Takarazuka Garden Hills, which opened in Takarazuka City, Hyogo Prefecture, on August 1, 2021, is an assisted-living senior residence with 130 rooms, a large bathing facility, a restaurant and a dining area that serves Japanese kappo cuisine. The dining area provides a place for residents and their families to share a meal and communicate with each other. The dining area is also available for use by the general public, making this the first complex care facility designed with the community in mind. Excellent Care Systems Inc., which manages the facility, operates approximately 50 nursing care facilities in major cities in Japan. Excellent Takarazuka Garden Hills is equipped with the latest facilities and systems that make use of the company’s accumulated know-how in facility management. In conventional facilities, staff must make frequent rounds of the site to assist residents in their daily living and to check on their safety, which is extremely burdensome. With the nursing care industry as a whole facing a shortage of staff, how can such workloads be reduced? Responding to these challenges, Excellent Takarazuka Garden Hills has introduced an IoT-based nursing care support system to reduce on site workload while improving resident safety and satisfaction.
Solution
This system uses “Live Connect,” a care support system from Z-Works, Inc. The AXIS M1045-LW Network Camera, a wireless compact network camera from Axis Communications, is used as one of the sensors in the system.
By providing IoT sensors customized for each resident, Live Connect can monitor conditions in the resident’s room and check the resident’s physical condition, including heart rate, respiration rate, and sleep status, in real time, 24 hours a day. When an abnormality is reported by one of the sensors, a staff member uses a smartphone to immediately check the Axis camera installed in the room.
Effects
With this care support system in place, staff no longer need to constantly make rounds of the facility, which lets them work more efficiently. The effect of this has been to make more time available for chatting and other communication with residents than was previously possible. It is generally believed that the introduction of IoT and AI systems would reduce human-to-human communication. However, by delegating some of the work to these systems, human-to-human communication time increases. Another benefit of these camera installations has been the prevention of resident injuries and other safety measures. For example, when a resident falls, the situation is recorded so that the cause can be identified, and measures can be taken to prevent such accidents from happening again.
It’s difficult to check directly on the spot when a fall or other incident occurs, but at Excellent Takarazuka Garden Hills, we can clearly check with the Axis cameras and preserve the evidence of the situation which can be used to determine the cause of the incident.
Background and details of system introduction
Excellent Care Systems Inc. operates more than 50 nursing care service businesses tailored to the needs of residents, including fee-based nursing homes, group homes, and small-scale multifunctional in-home care. Excellent Takarazuka Garden Hills, which opened on August 1, 2021, is also moving forward with new initiatives, including the introduction of Live Connect, an IoT-based care support system. Group company Excellent Care Support Inc., provides support for the introduction of various supplies and systems for nursing care facilities, which led to this introduction of Live Connect.
In recent years, IoT systems and other systems have been used in many industries, and the nursing care industry is also introducing such systems to counter the outflow of human resources and reduce workloads caused by these labor shortages. Yamanaka said “We considered adopting IoT-based nursing care support systems to solve various nursing care issues and introduced the first system at Excellent Takarazuka Garden Hills.”
This care support system is equipped with AXIS M1045-LW Network Camera, a compact network camera capable of wireless communication to suit to the situation of residents in each room, a sleep sensor for measuring vital signs, multi-sensors for leaving the bed, toilet use and monitoring entrance and exit doors, and a nurse call for the care recording system to constantly acquire data and enable confirmation of situations on a monitor at the staff station. This information is not only available at the staff station - each staff member also has a mobile device that allows them to quickly check on various situations, including each resident’s physical condition.
In conventional operations, for example, one staff member was assigned to each floor to watch over the residents at night, and the frequency of watching over the residents (visiting rooms) was once every two hours. The introduction of this new care support system has reduced anxiety about not being able to see the residents, and when the system detects that a resident has left their bed, the degree of urgency can be ascertained via camera images, which leads to a reduction in stress and physical burden on staff. Specifically, when a resident moves in the middle of the night, the sensor response can be used to confirm the resident’s behavior and whether he/she has gone to the bathroom, etc. This reduces the need for periodic monitoring (room visits) and allows for more efficient care. Furthermore, even when providing assistance, the use of mobile terminals to check camera images and monitor the status of other residents is effective and seems to help reassure both on-site staff and residents. This efficient system of care support enables more time in between tasks during the day, which can be used by staff to communicate with each other and with residents. The care support system is also equipped with sensors to monitor physical condition and provide numerical values such as respiration rate and heart rate so that staff can assess situations based on their experience plus numerical values, which is also an advantage.
As the nursing care industry has been facing many issues with labor, Excellent Care System Inc. and Excellent Care Support Inc. are working to solve these issues using the IoT in this way. As noted above, reducing the workload of staff will increase communication with residents and improve customer satisfaction. The use of these latest technologies has been found to result in increased communication between people. In the future, the IoT will play an even more effective role as a communication tool if two-way communications using cameras are used so that family members can see each other. We hope that awareness of IoT-based nursing care support systems will spread and that their introduction will accelerate for the operation of nursing care facilities where residents can live happily and safely, and staff can work without being overburdened.
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AXIS M1045-LW Network Camera
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