In this special issue, various efforts at manufacturing sites that make use of tactile, visual, and olfactory senses for technological development in basic and applied fields are reported. In this review, the author introduces research trends related to the five senses from his personal perspective, which is slightly different from the standpoint of professional and practical development of materials and technologies that use KANSEI. First, the role of the five senses as an interface that connects people or human being with the outside world is described, and then the history of the development of science and technology related to the five senses is outlined. In addition, recent research on new forms of interfaces that have emerged along with the development of brain science is also described.

The benefits of using wood in living environments, such as wooden buildings, were reaffirmed in Japan in the 1960s, and studies were conducted to explain these benefits. In the first phase of research, studies were conducted to determine how the physical and chemical properties of wood were related to human wellbeing and to clarify the thermal and humidity control functions of wood according to environmental parameters in wooden buildings. Subsequently, studies were conducted to clarify the health benefits of wood in actual buildings using questionnaires and to determine the effects of wood on human psychophysiology based on measured physiological responses. Due to increased demand for wood in nonresidential buildings, studies are being conducted on the effects of wood on the intellectual productivity of office workers in the workplace and the economic benefits of wood in commercial facilities. This review explores the evolution of amenity and KANSEI engineering of wood, including the historical background and perspectives of previous studies, and outlines new research developments in the field.

The perception of tactile sensation in human touch is significant as it serves as a vital source of information for evoking various emotions and for comprehending the physical characteristics of materials and assessing theeffectiveness of products. We employed a biomimetic tactile sensing system, which mimics the physiological process of generating tactile sensation through a finger model and sinusoidal motion, to evaluate the tactile textures of various objects. By focusing on interfacial phenomena, particularly friction, that occur on the skin’ s surface, we were able to determine the physical mechanisms of textures such as“ moistness,”“ smoothness,” and“ warmth.” These methods were also applied to the evaluation of various materials and products, including cosmetics and paints. The results of these evaluations will be utilized to develop more realistic virtual reality systems and tactile humanoid robots, as well as textiles, cosmetics, and automotive materials.

Melanin plays a vital role in structural coloration in nature. Recently, we have focused on using polydopamine, a melanin-like polymer, to produce structural color materials. Here we outline our recent work on structural color materials based on artificially synthesized melanin particles inspired by the color of peacock feathers. Since melanin particles act as a structural color material component and a scattering absorber, high-visibility structural color materials can be produced with a single component. This simple and novel process of using artificial melanin particles will be helpful in basic research on structural colors in nature and ink applications.

Clothing comfort sensation is composed of multisensory processes by stimulus based on microclimate within clothing, clothing pressure and skin and clothing contact. This paper introduces research topics on contact between the skin and clothing in Kansei evaluation of textile products. Since the 1980s, Kansei engineering has been promoted as a new technology to create products with high customer satisfaction in the automobile industry. In recent years, Kansei engineering has been utilized in many industries as a technology to create products with new value. Kansei engineering is also used in the textile apparel industry to develop comfortable clothing. This paper introduces research topics that the evaluation methods for measuring psychological and physiological responses and motions obtained from people and evaluating clothing comfort. The evaluation method is consisted with three measurement elements; （1）stimulus, （2）pschological responses, （3）physiological responses. It is important theme to create measurement methods of each element in the research of clothing comfort. In particular, the key point is the method of evaluating comfort from the measurement of physiological responses.

Rich foam is one of the most important features of a body cleanser. Although there have been many studies on the visual and physical aspects of foam, such as “foamability” and “stability,” the origin of the sensory values that foam provides, such as“ pleasant” and“ mild to the skin”, are not well understood. In this study, we investigated the rheology and dynamic friction properties of foam, focusing on the adhesion to solid surfaces with which it directly contacts. The results suggest that the flow of foam on solid surfaces is highly dependent on the properties of the solid surface, and that the presence of foam felt by our hands when expanding the foam is caused by the resistance forces attributed to the deformation of bubbles and adhesive force to the substrate.

“Sensing odors” is one of the ways for humans to　detect the various changes outside the body using the sense of smell among the five senses. Although there are hundreds of thousands of kinds of odor components on the earth, we can extremely sniff out many of these odor components easily. Generally, odor evaluation methods can be roughly divided into the sensory evaluation -subjective evaluation, and the instrumental analysis - objective evaluation such as odor/gas sensors and GC/MS. However, these evaluation methods have advantages and disadvantages, therefore we can see the sniffing-GC/MS these days, which are combined both subjective and objective evaluation for an accurate evaluation. This review introduced an overview for the mechanism of detecting the odor components, and especially focus on hot melt adhesives for controlling the various odor. A slight amount of VOCs and/or odor components are generated from these hot melt adhesives. We tried to remove the VOC/odor components from the hot melt adhesives using novel odor removal technique so called M-ZeroTM method.