An intelligent service planning system for effective home care service scheduling

Abstract

Due to the increasing aging population over the world, it is challenging to take care of the large number of elderly people who are weak and living alone. In order to assist them to remain part of the community, home care services are being focused on enabling elderly people to receive nursing and care services in their familiar home and community environment. However, with the increasing need for home nursing care services, there is an insufficient number of nursing staff to provide service to these elderly people. Further, nursing staff may need to work on tight schedules to fulfill the extra needs of the elderly, and may affect their working performance and result in poor service satisfaction. In this paper, an intelligent service planning system (ISPS) is designed for facilitating decision making in effective home care service scheduling. The Genetic Algorithm (GA) approach is applied in the system to formulate the service schedule for each nursing staff by considering the estimated time for serving the elderly. In order to validate the feasibility of the proposed system, a case study was conducted in a healthcare center. The results show that the service satisfaction from the elderly and the work satisfaction of the nurses are both increased.