Recently, Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIBS) is employed in various research fields as the method of evaluating brain function. However, an effective methodology specific to those researches has not yet been established. For instance, methods such as comparison of scatter chart of acquired data, determination of degree of change in hemoglobin levels, and judgment of the topography image, are performed. These solving methods pose problems influencing the difference in the measurement, the difference in the hemoglobin movement each the humans, and the propriety of the experimental content for the research. Therefore, authors focus on the time series data obtained from the NIBS and attempt to employ trend analysis, which is one of the effective methods for this solving, and apply the frequency analysis via the autoregressive e(AR)model and the moving average method for smoothing data, aiming to eliminate heartbeat signal with noise data and the treatment afterwards. Consequently, the proposal of a highly effective method was made by attempting an analysis method that had not yet been established. Furthermore, the programming for the NIIZS analysis software is scheduled to be performed after resolution of the various problems associated with it.

In this study, the right and left index fingers of the subjects were constantly stimulated by a mechanical vibration device to examine the possibility of an asynchronous brain machine interface (BMI) based on steady-state somatosensory evoked potentials (SSSEPs). In the experiments, the subjects were instructed to attend on the finger indicated by the visual que. EEGs were recorded from 61 electrodes on the entire head. First, SSSEPs in the range of 10 to 40 were measured and evaluation vectors were obtained. Secondly, narrow band pass filter, principal component analysis (PCA) and in dependent component analysis (ICA) were applied to obtain independent components (ICs). Lastly, the IC reflecting SSSEP was automatically selected based on the evaluation vector. The reconstructed time courses of the IC tended to be increased when subjects attended on the indicated finger. These results demonstrate that the presented method was useful for detecting the SSSEPs and an asynchronous BMI based on SSSEP may be promising.

This study proposes a new method for analyzing measured signal by using functional Near-infrared Spectroscopy(fNIRS). Brain activities of subjects with mental calculation are measured by fNIRS and functional magnetic resonance imaging(fMRI). Results of mental calculation with several subjects by using fNIRS show that the pro-posed methods based on the multi-resolution analysis and the Z-score are effective for the evaluation of brain activities due to the task.

Our long-term research objective is to analyze the cognitive process of a subject facing different kind of human-machine interface by applying a procedure of neuroimaging study. In the present study, we investigated brain activity during digital and analog meter inspection tasks with two-difficulty levels using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Twenty-five healthy volunteers participated in this study. The subjects were instructed to inspect the three meters, and to press the appropriate button corresponding to the meter if value of the one of three meters exceeded the upper or lower limit. The different task difficulty was devised by controlling the rate of change for the value to be displayed. The results showed that the activation of the right occipitotemporal junction and the left cerebellar posterior lobule increased due to the task difficulty in the case of analog meter inspection. By contrast, there was no significant difference by the task difficulty in the case of digital meter inspection. Therefore, our results suggested that the effect of a interface design and task difficulty, and its interrelationships for cognitive processes could be evaluated from neuroimaging data.

While an object remains the same, the colors which can be seen vary in terms of the object's lighting. In this research, the flowers (cherry blossoms, roses and sunflowers) were selected as objects. An illumination environment that brightly lit up the total view, including the background of the objects (global illumination), and a spot illumination environment that did not directly come into the view of viewers (partial illumination) were set up. Under the above conditions, how the change of color temperature of illumination affected the impression evaluations of the flowers was investigated by a subjective assessment. As a result, When the color temperature changes were controlled, the subjective impressions of the flowers' appearances were also consequentially changed. Moreover, all of the flowers created a warm and clear impression by using lighting of a low color temperature, but as the color temperature rose, the impression made by the objects quickly became more pessimistic. It was revealed that, in the case of global illumination, which brightly lit up the total environment including the background and not just the objects to be illuminated, tended to leave a beautiful impression and easily gave viewers a warm feeling, compared to the case of a partial illumination.

In this paper, we propose a method for finding the user's target function from the user's sequential operations of Audio Visual home appliances when it is difficult for the users to operate them. We get user's selected menu label history of DVD/HDD recorder that is one of the Audio Visual appliances, and we simulate a precision to find a target function by conventional method based on label following strategy. As a result, it is clear that the conventional method cannot find user's target function at enough precision. The reason is the user's operation is not a unique strategy. Operation of Audio visual home appliance consists of two decisions. One is decision of function and another is decision contents. We classify the user's operation to two types by the order of decision of the functions and the contents. Those are called by a function oriented operation and a contents oriented operation. We improve the method based on label following strategy by judging each two operations. We confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed method using selected menu label history data derived from 8 kinds of tasks by 6 operators. As a result, the ratio of the target function in the top 10-candidates improved to 26.3% comparing with the conventional method.