Excretion care assistance device and excretion care assistance method

1 . An excretion care assistance device comprising at least one processor configured to carry out:

a first specification process of specifying defecation times of care-receivers included in at least one care-receiver group on the basis of output signals from sensor terminals which are worn by the care-receivers and which include excretion sensors; and

a second specification process of specifying a time at which group excretion care is to be started for the at least one care-receiver group, in accordance with a frequency distribution indicative of a total number of times of defecation in each of a plurality of time periods, the frequency distribution being determined from the defecation times that have been specified in the first specification process.

2 . The excretion care assistance device according to claim 1 , wherein, in the second specification process, the at least one processor specifies, as the time at which the group excretion care is to be started for the at least one care-receiver group, an ending point of a time period in which the total number of times of defecation is the largest, among the plurality of time periods.

3 . The excretion care assistance device according to claim 1 , wherein:

the at least one care-receiver group comprises a plurality of care-receiver groups; and

the at least one processor specifies a time at which group excretion care is to be started, for each of the plurality of care-receiver groups, by carrying out the first specification process and the second specification process for each of the plurality of care-receiver groups.

4 . The excretion care assistance device according to claim 1 , configured to further carry out an estimation process of estimating, in accordance with the frequency distribution, the number of caregivers needed for excretion care for the at least one care-receiver group.

5 . An excretion care assistance method comprising:

carrying out a first specification process with at least one processor specifying defecation times of care-receivers included in at least one care-receiver group on the basis of output signals from sensor terminals which are worn by the care-receivers and which include excretion sensors; and

carrying out a second specification process of specifying a time at which group excretion care is to be started for the at least one care-receiver group, in accordance with a frequency distribution indicative of a total number of times of defecation in each of a plurality of time periods, the frequency distribution being determined from the defecation times that have been specified in the first specification process.

6 . The excretion care assistance device according to claim 2 , wherein, in the second specification process, the at least one processor is configured to specify the ending point of a time period by inputting the frequency distribution into a time-point specification model that has been subjected to machine learning using training data in which the frequency distribution is an explanatory variable, and the plurality of time periods are objective variables.

7 . The excretion care assistance device according to claim 4 , wherein, in the estimation process, the number of caregivers is estimated based on the frequency distribution inputted into a caregiver-number estimation model that has been subjected to machine learning using training data in which the frequency distribution is an explanatory variable and the number of caregivers is an objective variable.