Validation of clinical activity tracking system in Intensive Care Unit to assess nurse workload distribution.

Therapeutic Intervention Score System (TISS-28) and the Nursing Activities Score (NAS) are common used to evaluate nursing workload in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). However, they require experienced researchers to perform, are subject to user bias and experience, and are labor intensive, which all exclude regular use. A Clinical Activities Tracking System (CATS) was developed to evaluate bedside nursing activities automatically. This paper presents the validation of this system in quantifying bedside nursing activities. A total of 30 hours (1 hour/day) of nursing activities were manually recorded by trained researcher. The manually recorded total time spent on bedside nursing activities (Atime) was compared with time recorded using CATS (Ctime). A high correlation was found between Atime and Ctime with R = 0.882, and thus the actual time spent in nursing activity can be estimated using a first order polynomial function. In this study, it was found that the median Atime between 7 am-10 pm is 1.4-1.5 times higher than nursing activities at 10 pm-7 am. Results showed that CATS was able to provide unique and high information on patient bedside nursing activities.