Work and speech interactions among staff at an elderly care facility

Abstract

We observed bathing assistance, night shift operations, and handover tasks at a private elderly care home for 8 days. We collected approximately 400 h of recorded speech, 42,000 transcribed utterances, data from an indoor location tracking system, and handwritten notes by human observers. We also analyzed speech interaction in the bathing assistance task. We found that (1) staff members are almost always speaking during tasks, (2) remote communication is rare, (3) about 75% of utterances are spoken to the residents, (4) the intended recipient of utterances is frequently switched, and (5) about 17% of utterances contain personal names. We also attempted clustering utterances into passages, and about 33% of passages contained only one person’s name. These results should be applicable in semi-automatic long-term care record taking.