P50

The Perceived Usefulness of Technology in Nursing Students for Fall Prevention

Date

October 11, 2023

Background/significance: Falls are major medical issues in healthcare, causing serious complications and potential death in the elderly, and injuries from falls can bring long-term mobility issues and severe medical bleeding issues. Today, technology and robots could advance the quality of healthcare enormously from fall prevention to other nursing interventions. Nurses’ ages, races, and previous video game-playing experience play a role in how to maximize the usefulness in terms of technology uses and applications.

Purpose: This study was conducted to investigate how the clinical usefulness of using a harness with technology or a gait belt only could contribute to the result of fall risk reduction in nursing students.

Methods: The study was approved by IRB at the university on human-robot interaction using an adaptive robotic nursing assistant (ARNA) as an intervention study. 20 nursing students were recruited as participants. The perceived data was collected by using a web survey named Qualtric Survey with setups of sequences on gait belt with human (GB), gait belt with ARNA (GB+ARNA), and harness with ARNA (harness+ARNA). A five-point Likert scale was used to record perceived usefulness and video-game playing experiences along with participants’ demographic variables. The mean of each sequence on the perceived usefulness and video-game playing experiences was calculated as an observed response variable. A linear mixed model (estimated using REML and nloptwrap optimizer) was used to predict the perceived usefulness as a study's dependent variable. The main effect variables include a set-up variable (as “treatment”), period (time point), sequence (cross-over effect), age, race, and video-game playing experience. The model included ID as a random effect with a random slope. 95% confidence interval (CI) and p-values generated from a Wald t-distribution approximation.

Results: The mean age of the sample population was 24.9. (18-40, SD=6). The majority of the population was females (88.9%). The ethnicities contained 66.7% Caucasians, 27.8% African Americans, and 5.5% Asians. The mean value from the video-game playing experience was 3.1(SD=1.3). We found out that the effects of GB+ARNA and harness+ARNA compared with GB only were not significant in this model. On the seq (GB+ARNA, harness+ARNA, GB), the effects were statistically significant and positive (beta=1.34,p=.0001), the effect of race (African Americans) were statistically significant and negative (beta = -0.51, p= 0.003), and the effects from the video game-playing experiences were statistically significant and negative (beta = -1.05, p= 0.018). By comparing models with and without random effects, the result of the likelihood ratio test indicated that the model with random effect was preferable (chi-square=23.51, p-value<.00001).

Conclusions/implications: Using technology and robotics is beneficial in terms of fall prevention in healthcare, this interventional study will help us understand the effects and feasibility of the perceived technology usefulness in the population who have a background in the science of nursing, and also provided data to support future research and studies. Understanding the perceived technology usefulness will assist with creating fall prevention strategies within high-risk patient populations, enhancing the possibilities of technology utilization in healthcare.

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