Design and implementation of a simple home nursing care support system using Domain Name System

Japan has been changing to an aging society with fewer children, and this trend is expected to escalate in the future. Considering the impact to Japanese society, medical and welfare support should be improved. However, current care support is quite poor. Especially, smaller nursing facilities are in severe condition due to lack of sufficient help. In order to alleviate burden on nursing care, some works have done, but they assumed to use the care support system in larger nursing facilities or hospitals, and is oriented to provide sophisticated multiple functions. In this paper, we focus on supporting home nursing care case. We propose a simple vital information management system using domain name system, DNS. Adapting DNS scheme in the system enables to use various information equipments, including secondhand portable game machine, as a handheld terminal for register the patient´s information. We show the details of encoding and embedding the vital information and interaction behavior between client and server. At the same time we introduce the DNSWrapper software which we newly developed. DNSWrapper can extracts and decodes the information from queried hostname, and plays a important role in our system. Finally we show the implementation and its estimation.