Activity Recognition of Nursing Tasks in a Hospital: Requirements and Challenges

In nursing, the documentation of the nursing activities carried out plays an important role. However, the shortage of nursing staff and the resulting increasing lack of time means that the documentation is often not filled out completely. Human activity recognition (HAR) could assist with documentation by automatically recognising the services performed and entering them into the documentation system. For this purpose, data from different wearable and stationary sensors have to be processed. This paper will describe the requirements to develop such an activity recognition system. These are both functional and non-functional requirements. These requirements have been developed both from a review of current literature and after discussions with nursing students and representatives of nursing management of local hospitals and nursing science. In addition, activities in nursing that frequently need to be documented are listed. The results should therefore serve as a basis for the implementation of a system for the HAR of nursing activities.