Toward the Evaluation of Handwashing Skills Based on Image Processing

Various infectious diseases have been known today. In hospitals, according to international guidelines, the hand hygiene is educated and practiced through handwashing for the purpose of preventing infectious diseases. Actually, several studies have been conducted to evaluate the skills of handwashing. However, in the previous works, the quantitative and objective evaluations have not been performed. In this paper, we propose a new method to evaluate the skill of handwashing. The method is based on the image processing, and the evaluation is realized in a quantitative and qualitative manner. Eighty-four students in department of nursing participated in our experiment, and our proposed method was validated. As the result, the area of pseudo-dirty spots on hand after washing could be extracted quantitatively and objectively. Our method will be applicable to education of nursing toward the prevention of infection spread.