Toward Sentiment Analysis in Elderly Care Facility

Hand-over notes are extremely important to share information about irregular incidents at elderly care facilities and provide high-quality services. However, taking notes is a time-consuming task. Moreover, handwritten hand-over notes make it difficult to pass on experience and related know-how to other workers. To curate that field community intelligence, a handover support system for elderly care facilities was installed into a facility and evaluated. The system is now in actual operation at the care facility. The authors aim to use handover support system as a communication tool that sense the feelings of the care workers and supports them to maintain motivation and cultivate self-directedness. To realize this aim, this paper reports the results of hand-over data analysis and comparison with traditional paper-based hand-over notes. Furthermore, the authors explored the possibility of applying sentiment analysis technology to hand-over messages to sense the atmosphere of their working environment.