Expanding the healthy life expectancies is one of the urgent issues in Japanese society. The elderly tend to lose their health as their physical performances decline. The monitoring of the gait, which is the most fundamental motion in daily life, can play a key role in detecting the decline of the physical performance in an early stage. It is important to monitor the usual gait in usual environments to avoid any mental influences and to evaluate their actual conditions. Although studies on the gait monitoring system have already been reported, none of them is dedicated to the monitoring of the gait in daily life. The gait information acquisition by using a small sensor agent robot, which we suggested in the previous studies, is capable of monitoring in living spaces. This system estimates knee joint positions and heel positions. However, its accuracy has not been evaluated, and its performance in a real living environment has not been tested. In this paper, (1) we examined the important gait parameters to be monitored, (2) evaluated our system using a 3D motion analysis, and (3) considered the usability of our system in a real living environment.
 Gait parameters can be categorized into three types: space-temporal parameters, kinematic parameters, and kinetic parameters. Our suggested method realizes to acquire space-temporal and kinematic parameters without any wearable sensors on their body. Among the gait parameters which the patients and the controls showed differences, the space-temporal parameters can be calculated by heel position. Regarding the kinematic parameters, position estimation of joint is necessary. Thus, we selected knee joint position and heel position to be estimated as the first step for markerless gait analysis.
 The accuracy evaluation experiment was held. Our system was evaluated by precise 3D motion analysis, VICON (gold standard). To compare our system with the previous method, data acquisition by Kinect v2 skeleton tracking was also conducted and the results were evaluated by VICON. We evaluated our method and the conventional method with 3D motion analysis by 3D Euclid distance, Pearson's correlation coefficients, and signal-to-noise ratio. As the result, we found that our suggested method could more accurately estimate than the conventional method in both knee joint position and heel position. It can be said that the knee joint positions estimated by our method can be utilized in clinical measurement.
 Our system was tested in a one-room apartment for a single household to clarify the capability of our system. We set five daily activities to acquire the depth data of participants walking by a robot. Three male participants aged 23 to 24 walked the four routes corresponding to the five daily activities. We confirmed that our system could estimate the knee joint positions during walking in the context of daily activities. Also, we found that there was a difficulty of our robot following algorithm.
 To clarify the gait in living environment by applying our system to wide attributed participants and to find the challenges of the system are our future work.

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 This study intends to determine the relation between individual attributes and preferences of living room appearance in the context of preference-individual attribute relationship studies.
 The experiment in which the impressions of a series of 40 living room images were rated on 17 semantic differential scales including their preferences and 11 monopolar scales. A questionnaire, which consisted of 174 two- to four-point scales, was also completed after the images were rated to determine the participant's lifestyle and their attitude. The experiment comprised 99 subjects who were young female students aged between 18 and 22 years.

 Results: The five sample clusters, derived from cluster analysis using the preference ratings, consisted of decorative rooms (RG1), feminine taste rooms (RG2), popular taste rooms (RG3), Japanese-style or modern style rooms (RG4), and stylish rooms (RG5). The experimental participants were divided into five groups (PG1–PG5 comprised 14, 26, 4, 21, and 34 people, respectively) depending on results of cluster analysis.
 The average values of each questionnaire were compared among participant groups using Tukey's HSD test to assess the attributes concerning preference tendencies. The relationships between rating differences across the room image groups and differences in scores are as follows.
 1) People belonging to PG1 preferred only RG4 (Japanese-style and modern rooms), like common fashion more than PG2, and prefer weak colors and non-fancy taste more than PG4. They would be comfortable maintaining a low profile.
 2) People belonging to PG2 preferred RG2 (feminine taste rooms) in addition to RG4. They spend money on fashion more than PG1, prefer warm, light, and bright colors as compared to PG5. They would have interest in fashion, and have colorful tastes.
 3) People belonging to PG3 preferred only RG3 (popular taste rooms). It is difficult to interpret the difference among participant groups because the number of constituents was very small.
 4) People belonging to PG4 showed much higher rating averages than did other participant groups preferred RG5 (stylish rooms), in addition to RG2 and RG4. They love communication and want to be perceived as grown-up when compared to PG2, want to be richer and like an extravagant atmosphere as compared to PG5, and they are more fascinated with individuality than are other groups. They would be extroverts, and long for their dream life.
 5) People belonging to PG5 have a similar tendency to those in PG4, even though the preferences for RG1, RG2, and RG3 were lower. They are particular about room appearance and prefer structured design more than the other groups do, and do not prefer girlish designs.
 These consequences indicate in part the ability of room interior preferences to reflect a person's characteristics, especially as concerns their high-low profile tendencies, on the other hand, partly express design preferences for color, light, form, and so on.

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 In the sound insulation measurement of partition walls between dwelling rooms, the incident sound field in a source room strongly depends on the geometry of the room, and it is not regarded as random incidence at low frequencies. Considering the incidence-angle dependence in sound insulation performance from such phenomenon as coincidence effect in concrete walls and resonance transmission in multiple-layered wall structures, it is possible that the characteristics of incident sound fields in source rooms affect the sound insulation performance in field measurement.
This paper aims to establish an experimental method for analyzing the characteristics of the incident sound fields in dwelling rooms under sound insulation measurement. First, a method to separate incident plane waves from an incident sound field was proposed, where the propagation mode expansion is applied with two layers of planar microphone array. Then, the proposed method was applied to FEM models of source rooms with various absorption conditions to test its applicability to dwelling rooms and to demonstrate its effectiveness in analyzing the incident characteristics.
The reconstructed SPL and the ratio of reflected to incident energy for the FEM models were obtained by the proposed method. The result showed that the inclusion of evanescent modes in the mode expansion improves accuracy in the separation of incident waves. Regarding the influence of the room absorption, the result demonstrated that the incident waves are separated with good accuracy in the case where the absolute value of the phase angle of the impedance is small on the side walls normal to the incident wall. It was revealed that a large absolute value of the phase angle of the impedance on the side walls leads to serious separation error in the frequency range with a high modal density, due to the deviation from the assumption of rigid boundary condition in the mode expansion. However, the error caused by the phase of wall impedance remained relatively small in the low frequency range with a low modal density, and the proposed method is considered to be applicable to low frequencies regardless of the phase of wall impedance.
Additionally, the directional distribution of the incident energy density was calculated for the FEM models using the proposed method, and the result demonstrated the influence of room absorption on the directivity of incident energy at low frequencies. Moreover, the calculated result of total incident energy on the wall showed a difference from the result by the conventional diffuse-field assumption, reflecting the non-uniformity of the incident directivity at low frequencies.
In future study, we plan to apply the proposed method to actual rooms to further validate its applicability and to consider the characteristics of the incident sound fields in dwelling rooms.

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 In this study, the method to evaluate thermal environment during sleep was proposed, with the aim of improvement of evaluation accuracy of thermal environment considering thermal insulation of bedding system and thermal conductance by changing sleep posture. To measure thermal insulation of bedding system and thermal conductance of contact surface with bedding, the experiment using thermal manikin was conducted in climate chamber in 2016. Thermal insulations of bedding system under 20 conditions of different bedding hanging type and sleeping posture were measured. Also, to examine thermal environment evaluation method, a field survey was conducted in July, August and September 2017 in actual bedrooms, and used polysomnography to evaluate sleep quality. The thermal environment and physiological parameters were continuously monitored during sleep in each subject's bedroom. To evaluate temporal change of sleeping environment, sleeping appearance was measured by video. The subjects were 18 young and 5 middle aged persons who did not possess any sleep disorders. Each subject's sleep was monitored for five nights.
 It was confirmed that the relationship between the ratio of the body surface area of the part where the body and the bedding contact and thermal insulation is exponential. Compared with the supine position, thermal insulation in the lateral decubitus position was lower, and thermal insulation was changed also depending on ratio covered by futon. Based on the measured value by experiment, the presumption formula witch predicts thermal insulation considering clothes, quilts, comforters, sleeping postures was proposed. Also, it was showed that the heat flux between the mattress and the back in the supine position decreased exponentially as time elapsed. By converting the measured data to the heat load of whole body and considering the influence of the ambient temperature, the inference formula of heat conduction caused by the change of the contact surface with the bedding by turning over was proposed.
 Proposed estimated equation of thermal insulation and heat conduction by turning at sleep was applied to video data measured by field survey in actual bedrooms. As a result of evaluating the thermal environment considering the change in thermal insulation and thermal conduction, it was found that the relationship between heat load of human body and wake after sleep onset(WASO) was stronger than the case of assumption that the environment does not change throughout the night. It was confirmed that the evaluation accuracy of the thermal environment improved by appropriately evaluation of the change of thermal environment over time during sleep. The usefulness of appropriate thermal environment evaluation by using this proposed method was shown.
 As a result of analyzing heat load of human body which was calculated by the proposed method, it was confirmed that WASO without turning occurred and the ratio of WASO increased in an environment away from thermal neutrality. Also, it was revealed that turning without WASO occurred, and at the time of thermal neutrality, the ratio of WASO was about 50%, not necessarily happen WASO. In both cases, the ratio of WASO increased in an environment deviating from thermal neutrality. And, relationship between human heat load and ratio of WASO showed that the ratio of WASO was significantly increased when away from thermal neutrality. The width of the thermal acceptance zone during sleep was wider than at arousal time, indicating the possibility of accepting a slightly warm environment.

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 Many cooking appliances are installed at high density in commercial kitchens, and the indoor thermal environment is influenced by the heat they generate. A poor environment can decrease productivity and affect worker health. In order to keep the kitchen environment comfortable, the displacement ventilation system is an ideal HVAC system that can also reduce energy consumption. However, the displacement ventilation system is not popular in Japan because large-sized air diffusers for displacement ventilation cannot be installed in small commercial kitchens.
 The previous study developed a displacement ventilation system with ceiling-mounted air diffusers (hereafter, ceiling displacement ventilation system) which can be installed in a small kitchen. The system was installed in a commercial electrical kitchen and it was confirmed that the indoor environment was kept in good condition. In this study, the applicability of such a system to commercial gas kitchens is examined, and the effects of low-radiative/concentrated-exhaust cooking appliances on indoor thermal conditions are determined with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation and field measurements.
 In the design stage, CFD simulation was conducted to find the appropriate position for air diffusers, airflow rate, and supply temperature. Two conditions were assumed in the simulation, i.e., the cooking condition and serving condition, because the operation of appliances depend on the amount type of work. The displacement ventilation system was compared to a mixing ventilation system based on the CFD results. The results obtained by CFD simulation are shown below.
 (1) In the case of the mixing ventilation system, high-momentum airflow from supply openings disturbed the thermal plume above the cooking appliances, and diffused hot and humid air in the kitchen. On the other hand, the ceiling displacement ventilation system did not cause the airflow to disturb the thermal plume.
 (2) In the case of the ceiling displacement ventilation system, when the supply air temperature was set to 20 °C and the surface velocity of exhaust hoods was set to 0.3 m/s, the kitchen temperature was kept at below 23 °C. Even when the supply temperature was set to 22 °C and the air volume of some exhaust hoods was reduced, the kitchen temperature remained at less than 24 °C.
 (3) In the case of the ceiling displacement ventilation system, the supply air diffuser was installed at a high position so that there is concern about the short circuit of supplied air to the exhaust opening. When the air diffuser for displacement ventilation was installed in the wrong location, indoor conditions became poor.
 The ceiling displacement ventilation system was installed in a commercial gas kitchen based on this study. After construction, the actual thermal and air environment was studied by field measurements. The distribution air temperature, humidity, CO₂, and Wet Bulb Globe Temperature (WBGT) were measured under cooking and serving conditions. The airflow visualization test was also conducted to examine the influence of side panels of the hood on capture efficiency. The following results were obtained.
 (1) The air temperature in the occupied zone under cooking conditions was less than 24 °C.
 (2) The temperature near the ceiling was higher by 1 °C to 2 °C than that near the floor surface.
 (3) The visualization test showed that the side panel prevented the thermal plume from escaping the exhaust hood
 (4) The CO₂ concentration and WBGT were less than 550 ppm and 28 °C, respectively.

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