• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.73-94
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• 2010

The attending system is a medical system that allows doctors in clinics to use the extra equipment in hospitals-beds, laboratory, operating room, etc-for their patient's care under a contract between the doctors and hospitals. Therefore, the system is very beneficial in terms of the efficiency of the usage of medical resources. However, it is necessary to develop a strong support system to strengthen its weaknesses and supplement its merits. If doctors use hospital beds under the attending system of hospitals, they would be able to check a patient's condition often and provide them with nursing care services. However, the current attending system lacks delivery and assistance support. Thus, for the successful performance of the attending system, a networking system should be developed to facilitate communication between the doctors and nurses. In particular, the nursing records in the attending system could help doctors monitor the patient's condition and provision of nursing care services. A nursing record is the formal documentation associated with nursing care. It is merely a data repository that helps nurses to track their activities; nursing records thus represent a resource of primary information that can be reused. In order to maximize their usefulness, nursing records have been introduced as part of computerized patient records. However, nursing records are internal data that are not disclosed by hospitals. Moreover, the lack of standardization of the record list makes it difficult to share nursing records. Under the attending system, nurses would want to minimize the amount of effort they have to put in for the maintenance of additional records. Hence, they would try to maintain the current level of nursing records in the form of record lists and record attributes, while doctors would require more detailed and real-time information about their patients in order to monitor their condition. Therefore, this study developed a system for assisting in the maintenance and sharing of the nursing records under the attending system. In contrast to previous research on the functionality of computer-based nursing records, we have emphasized the practical usefulness of nursing records from the viewpoint of the actual implementation of the attending system. We suggested that nurses could design a nursing record dictionary for their convenience, and that doctors and nurses could confirm the definitions that they looked up in the dictionary through negotiations with intelligent agents. Such an agent-based system could facilitate networking among medical institutes. Multi-agent systems are a widely accepted paradigm for the distribution and sharing of computation workloads in the scientific community. Agent-based systems have been developed with differences in functional cooperation, coordination, and negotiation. To increase such communication, a framework for a multi-agent based system is proposed in this study. The agent-based approach is useful for developing a system that promotes trade-offs between transactions involving multiple attributes. A brief summary of our contributions follows. First, we propose an efficient and accurate utility representation and acquisition mechanism based on a preference scale while minimizing user interactions with the agent. Trade-offs between various transaction attributes can also be easily computed. Second, by providing a multi-attribute negotiation framework based on the attribute utility evaluation mechanism, we allow both the doctors in charge and nurses to negotiate over various transaction attributes in the nursing record lists that are defined by the latter. Third, we have designed the architecture of the nursing record management server and a system of agents that provides support to the doctors and nurses with regard to the framework and mechanisms proposed above. A formal protocol has also been developed to create and control the communication required for negotiations. We verified the realization of the system by developing a web-based prototype. The system was implemented using ASP and IIS5.1.

• 한국노년학
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• v.29 no.4
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• pp.1361-1381
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• 2009

There have lately been a variety of social issues in our society due to rapid social changes. Specifically, how to approach elderly people who suffer from dementia is never an easy task, and few in-depth studies have ever focused on their quality of life due to that. The purpose of this study was to examine the quality of life of elderly people with dementia and the relationship between their quality of life and the environments of facilities for them in an attempt to lay the foundation for the development of compatible programs tailored to the environments of the facilities and for relevant policy setting. It's ultimately meant to improve the quality of life of the elderly with dementia and the environments of facilities for them. The subjects in this study were elderly people with dementia who were housed in senior residential and medical welfare facilities in Daegu and Gyeongsangbukdo. The collected data were analyzed with a SPSS 12.0 program, and frequency analysis, cross-tabs and multiple logistic regression analysis were utilized. As a result, facility environments were identified as one of the variables that had a significant impact on the quality of life of the elderly people with dementia. There are some suggestions about how to boost their quality of life: First, good environments should be prepared in consideration of the characteristics of elderly people with dementia in order for themto be satisfied with their own quality of life, and the way of looking at their potentials should be changed. Second, it's found that main caregivers affected the quality of life of the elderly people with dementia, and the kind of programs that focus on the improvement of the relationship between elderly people with dementia and their main caregivers is required. Third, there should be a change in the environments of the facilities. The facilities should be well equipped to successfully respond to the symptoms of elderly people with dementia. To redress their poor accessibility to the facilities, infrastructure involving nursing homes and professional personnels should be built by utilizing the Internet, and the facilities and local community should make concerted efforts to provide quality care to elderly people in want of it.

• The Korean Journal of Medicine
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• v.94 no.1
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• pp.96-106
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• 2019

Background/Aims: It is well known that gender differences are associated with clinical outcomes in patients with acute myocardial infarction (AMI). However, it is not clear whether gender differences affect the prognosis of elderly patients with AMI. Methods: We analyzed the incidence of in-hospital complications and mortality in the Korea Acute Myocardial Infarction Registry-National Institutes of Health from November 2011 to June 2015. This study included elderly patients (≥ 75 years) diagnosed with AMI. Results: A total of 2,953 patients were eligible for this study. Among them, 1,529 (51.8%) patients were female, and the mean age of the female group was older than that of the male group (80.7 ± 4.4 vs. 79.6 ± 4.0 years, respectively, p < 0.001). Elderly females utilized emergency medical services less frequently compared with elderly males (11.5 vs. 15.4%, respectively, p < 0.001). Elderly female AMI patients had a similar rate of in-hospital mortality compared with elderly males (7.1 vs. 8.4%, respectively, p = 0.196). The rate of major cardiac adverse events (MACEs) was lower in elderly females than males during a 12-month follow-up (hazard ratio [HR] 1.19, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.00-1.41, p = 0.045). According to multivariate analysis, the male gender is an independent factor for predicting 1-year MACEs (HR 1.37, 95% CI 1.14-1.65, p < 0.001). Conclusions: No significant differences in peri-procedural complications or in-hospital mortality were observed between male and female elderly patients with AMI. However, elderly female patients had a more favorable prognosis than male patients during a 1-year clinical follow-up.

• Journal of dental hygiene science
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.17-24
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• 2010

The purpose of this study was to provide the basic data for effective intervention of oral health behaviors strategy and to compare the actual conditions about hypertension and diabetes case management of the elderly at the hall for the aged and the D senior's college. The research method was a questionnaire including hypertension and diabetes case management of the elderly and the subjects were 174 of the elderly(65 age over) at the hall for the aged(100) and the senior's college(74). The results of this study were as follows; 1. Hypertension 1)The incidence of hypertension of elderly at the hall for the aged and the senior's college were 32.2%. 2)83.9% of the hypertension cases were initially diagnosed during hospital examination(p < 0.05). 3)Regular blood pressure checks were performed more than one time monthly on 76.8% of the cases(p < 0.05). 4)Blood pressure control was well controlled on 75%(p < 0.05). 5)85.7% of the elderly at the hall for the aged took hypertension drugs daily and 42.9% of the elderly at the senior's college took no drug alternatively(p < 0.05). 2. Diabetes 1)The incidence of the diabetes of elderly at the hall for the aged and the senior's college were 14.4%. 2)80.0% of the diabetes cases were initially diagnosed during hospital examination(p < 0.05). 3)64.0% of the cases did not have blood sugar measuring instrument(p < 0.05). 4. In the quality of life, the thinking of no difficulty in walking and no anxiety/depression was more presented on the elderly at the senior's college than those at the hall for the aged(p < 0.05). 5. The subjective health condition scores were higher on the elderly at the senior's college than those at the hall for the aged(p < 0.05).