Can you please explain the exact output format that you want to represent a hand-off in? It will be helpful if you can explain it for the same example which you have given above. Do you wish to know between which two nurses a hand-off occurred? Also, what do you exactly mean by a frequency of hand-offs?
Based on your explanation and the example, I am assuming that a hand-off occurs when a next nurse starts observing. I am also assuming that only two nurses are involved per hand-off. These assumptions translate to observing transitions from 0 to 1 for each matrix row. One quick way to check for the transition is to compute the difference between successive time steps (columns) for each row.
A possible solution is provided below based on the above assumption. In that solution, differences along the adjacent columns of 'dat' matrix are computed using the diff function as follows:
>> dat = [1 0 0 0 0; 0 1 1 1 0; 0 0 0 1 1];
>> col_diff = diff(dat,1,2);
Additional information about the 'diff' function can be found in documentation link: MATLAB 'diff' documentation page
The output of the ‘diff’ function is stored in the variable named ‘col_diff’. The next step is to identify the columns in each row of ‘col_diff’ where the value is 1. A value of 1 in a particular row implies that at a previous time step, the nurse was not performing any observations, but is currently observing. The ‘find’ function can be used to identify the columns which contain a value of 1 for each row in the following manner:
>> [row handoff_times] = find(col_diff==1);
Additional information about the 'find' function can be found in documentation link: MATLAB 'find' documentation page
In the above code, the variable named ‘handoff_times’ is the variable of interest and stores the column number corresponding to the handoff. Since the computations performed used the ‘diff’ function, the values of the column numbers in ‘handoff_times’ will be less than the actual value by 1. The values can be adjusted using the following code:
>> handoff_times = handoff_times + 1;
The entire code snippet is included below for your reference:
dat = [1 0 0 0 0; 0 1 1 1 0; 0 0 0 1 1];
col_diff = diff(dat,1,2);
[row handoff_times] = find(col_diff==1);
handoff_times = handoff_times + 1;
