Development of a Healthcare Information System for Community Care of Older Adults and Evaluation of Its Acceptance and Usability.

Objective: The need for health and social care for community-dwelling elderly is on the rise as the population ages. Through the provision of comprehensive services by multiple professionals in local communities, elderly people can receive continual care in a non-medical setting, which is favorable for early detection and intervention of potential problems. However, the lack of digitalization in primary care affects the effectiveness of the services and precludes full exploitation of the data. This study proposed an information system dedicated to caring for community-dwelling elderly people and investigated its acceptance and usability. Methods: An information system was designed for elderly care centers in the community, where data generated during care delivery, involving socio-demographic data, bio-measurements and health assessments and questionnaires, were digitized and stored for information management and exchange. A study was conducted to evaluate the acceptance and usability of the system after routine use of 6 months. The users of the system at an elderly care center were recruited to respond to a technology acceptance questionnaire and a system usability questionnaire. Results: The mean scores of the acceptance and usability questionnaires reached 5.1 out of the highest possible score of 7. The constructs of the acceptance questionnaire had good reliability. The social influence and facilitating conditions constructs had a significant correlation with the behavioral intention construct. Conclusions: The proposed information system demonstrated good acceptance and usability, which supported the feasibility of implementing it in community care centers for older adults. Further research will be conducted to address the limitation of sample size by extending the system to other elderly care centers, forming a large user base for a more in-depth and comprehensive performance evaluation.

Virtual suturing simulation based on commodity physics engine for medical learning.

Development of virtual-reality medical applications is usually a complicated and labour intensive task. This paper explores the feasibility of using commodity physics engine to develop a suturing simulator prototype for manual skills training in the fields of nursing and medicine, so as to enjoy the benefits of rapid development and hardware-accelerated computation. In the prototype, spring-connected boxes of finite dimension are used to simulate soft tissues, whereas needle and thread are modelled with chained segments. Spherical joints are used to simulate suture's flexibility and to facilitate thread cutting. An algorithm is developed to simulate needle insertion and thread advancement through the tissue. Two-handed manipulations and force feedback are enabled with two haptic devices. Experiments on the closure of a wound show that the prototype is able to simulate suturing procedures at interactive rates. The simulator is also used to study a curvature-adaptive suture modelling technique. Issues and limitations of the proposed approach and future development are discussed.