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To improve elderly patients' understanding and safe usage of their medications. English-speaking hospital inpatients aged > or =65 years were recruited. They were self-medicating at home with at least 1 regular medication and had a Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) score of at least 20 out of 30. The patients were taught medication details on 3 consecutive days. The patients' medication knowledge was recorded before education and again at a home visit after discharge from hospital. Patient medication knowledge before education showed that participants knew 50% of brand names, dosage and times, 55% of medication purpose, and 15% of major side effects. At follow-up home visits, the relevant figures improved significantly to 90%, 85%, and 25%, respectively (P < or = .05). Similar improvement occurred in the 2 patient groups with an MMSE score of 20 to 24 and 25 to 30 (P = .03). This simple, practical, nursing-staff-conducted program worked well in a hospital setting and resulted in improved medication knowledge, even in patients with mild cognitive impairment.

A new camera using TDI (Time Delay and Integration) technology, capable of capturing high resolution images from continuously moving documents has been successfully demonstrated. The new camera operated at a high speed (120 ips) scanning mail for high quality OCR (optical character recognition). The camera achieves a high quality throughput by using eight parallel processing channels which are digitized to 256 levels (8 bits) within the camera at a total effective speed of 80 Mhz. Previous image pickup units have suffered from low contrast and low resolution at high speed. This new camera has the ability of producing gray scale information per pixel in a relatively low (80 times less power) light environment compared to similar line scan cameras. The camera output consists of 8 channels of video digitized simultaneously to provide a resolution of 2048 pixels per line, operating to a maximum line rate of 32 kHz. Experimental results demonstrate the ruggedness of TDI and its usefulness in a field environment. Results show that contrast ability did not significantly degrade despite velocity mismatch of 2.5% between the camera and the imaged document.