Visual behavior understanding as a care function of computerized description of medical care

This paper proposes a system for computerized description of medical care, and also shows its possibility by experimenting visual understanding of medical care by a doctor. Proposed system supports forming the medical documents by sensing and inputting the doctor´s behavior into a computer during medical care. In the system, the computer senses a doctors´ behavior using visual, aural and force sensors, and uses these sensor outputs to understand what care is being performed. The visual understanding of medical care is a core function of the system. Taking application of medicine to the ear, nose and throat in ortholaryngology clinics as a typical example of medical care, visual understanding of medical care is successfully performed. The procedure of visual understanding in the experiment is as follows: Firstly, CCD cameras monitor the objects(tools, medicine and the patient´s affected body parts) whose states change in accordance with the doctor´s actions. Secondly, the doctor´s action is identified with the change in the state of these objects. Finally, the doctor´s behavior is understood as the sequence of these identified actions. In the procedure: visual behavior understanding is more easily realized by monitoring objects used for behavior than by conventional method of monitoring the persons. Medical care description in, this paper will contribute to improve the quality of medical service by reducing the burden of medical information recording on doctors