In this study a web service for the interactions between home carers and their clients was developed. The aim was to provide a system for the exchange of messages and topics of conversation relating to the clients' interests. The system had two unique characteristics: firstly the use of digital pens so that the carers did not have to change their usual working practices of keeping records on paper, and secondly the carers received client related notifications via their mobile phone, which in turn tended to result in improved rapport.

This paper proposes a video communication assist system using a companion robot in coordination with the user's conversational attitude toward the communication. In order to maintain a conversation and to achieve comfortable communication, it is necessary to provide the user's attitude-aware assistance. First, the system estimates the user's conversational state by a machine learning method. Next, the robot appropriately expresses its active listening behaviors, such as nodding and gaze turns, to compensate for the listener's attitude when she/he is not really listening to another user's speech, the robot shows communication-evoking behaviors(topic provision)to compensate for the lack of a topic, and the system switches the camera images to create an illusion of eye-contact, corresponding to the current context of the user's attitude. from empirical studies and a demonstration experiment, i)both the robot's active listening behaviors and the switching of the camera image compensate for the other person's attitude, ii)elderly people prefer long intervals between the robot's behaviors, and iii)the topic provision function is effective for awkward silences.

When eating a meal with others, conversation occurs generally in addition. However, the difference between the conversation with and without meal is not known. Three-party conversations with and without meal were compared in this study. It was found that the conversational behavior including utterance and geture was more balanced among the participants with the meal condition. It is suggested that the eating behavior restricts utterance naturally, which causes a participant who has fewer utterances can find the utterance timing easily. This finding will influence the future design of communication support systems.

In Japan, promotion of domestic Pro-Environmental Behavior(PEB) is one of the main challenges for energy saving. Moderate communication is widely preferred because it is free from social stress, and it has potential as a collective method of promoting PEB. Purposes of this study are proposal of a method for promotion of continuous PEB with moderate communication, and evaluation of the effectiveness of the method. Main part of the proposed method is corrective remote communication activity among group members who live in their house, with a moderate communication system, which utilizes portable information device (iPod touch). This activity is expected to cause social facilitation of PEB among users. An evaluation experiment with ten participants　was conducted and the result showed that the proposed method promotes continuous domestic PEB if user can feel other members do PEB in the same room.

The pointing operation in video communication with a "shared space" approach is evaluated. The shared space is a constructed image in which remote image is overlaid with self-image. It is known that such way of communication can promote natural conversation including easy gaze recognition, feeling of space sharing, and so on. However performance of pointing operation in the shared space has not been examined fully. Experiments have been done to evaluate it with various parameters such as viewing angle, mirroring of the shared space image, and so on. As the results of experiments, guidelines for the shared space design using pointing are described.

Network games are attracting attention as perticipatory simulation plat-forms for social experiments because of their rich visualization performance and communication by chat and gesture. Our objective in this study is to develop a participatory simulation platform on a network game. Agents in a participatory multiagent-based simulation should behave as real-world humans according to behavior models. We propose an architecture for integrating network games and scenario processors. This integration makes it possible for simulation conducter to define and change agents' behavior model without customizing network games. In addition, text messages are used for communication between network games and scenario processors in order to integrate many kinds of network games. We implemented integrated platform of network game gumonji and scenario description language Q and conducted participatory simulation. Last of all, we illustrated applications of perticipatory simulations which are realized by our architecture.

In avatar-mediated communication, there is concern that the deference between user's and avatar's appearances detracts the sense of affinity. However, the personalized avatar did not produce the favorability against the expectation. In this study, a general deformation rule independent from the aspects of the model was discussed by comparing the sixteen cartoonish deformed portraits to the originals. An avatar personalize tool based on the averaged deformation proportions was developed. It was experimentally confirmed that the deformed-personalized avatars tend to produce the more sense of affinity.

In order to improve road safety, automobile manufacturers have been developing several types of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems(ADAS). It might be possible to arouse attention to enhance situation awareness through road-to-vehicle and inter-vehicle communications, resulting in decreased traffic accidents due to driver inattention. This paper describes effects of arousing attention on driver behaviour by using a high fidelity driving simulators. First it was investigated how car-following behaviour was influenced due to changes in traffic situations, i.e. surrounding vehicles decreased their speed or broke into the next lane. Next it was investigated effect of arousing attention on car-following behaviour and its impact on driving safety compared to situations in which arousing attention was not available. The results showed that there was a possibility that changes in traffic situations affected how to maintain time headway during car-following, resulting in increases in collision risk without arousing attention. Arousing attention had the potential to decrease collision ri sk. However continuous time for arousing attention might be impaired when the time elapsed between the presentation of arousing attention and occurrence of critical situations got longer. Potential applications of these results include important subjects considered when designing driver support systems with arousing attention.

In this paper, focusing on the handwriting with pen or pencil which is applied at not only daily but also clinical scene, we analyzed the improvement mechanism of accuracy of the handwriting by the inter-personal handwrite-training with embodied interaction between trainer and trainee. As the results, we found the improvement of not only the accuracy but also the synchronization of handwriting between trainer and　trainee by less than the ten-times training. Also we found the characteristic phenomenon of the remarkable decline of the synchronization with the time lag of handwritings at training just before the most accurate handwriting realized. Accordingly we may say　that the accurate handwriting was realized with extension of both trainer and trainee's　own Body Images containing mutually, by visual feedback from the other's handwriting.　Therefore we suggest that the inter-personal handwrite training may urge the reconstruction mechanism of Body Images, trainer and trainee containing the other's Body Image mutually.

In face-to-face communication, it is often observed that the body movements of a listener change almost simultaneously with changes in voice patterns of the speaker. This is referred to as 'entrainment'. The present study examined the relationship between the degree of teacher-student entrainment and students' interest in the lecture. Four university professors gave 60-minute lectures. The body movements of the students were recorded using a video camera located in the front of the lecture room and the voices of the professors were recorded using a microphone. After each lecture, the students were asked to rate their interest in the topic of the lecture. We used a computer-based video analysis to measure the intensity of students' body movements, and examined the temporal relationship between body movements and the intensity of the teacher's voice, by a moving correlation analysis. These coefficients can be regarded as the entrainment levels. In all lectures, there were positive and significant relationships between the level of entrainment and students' interest. These results indicate that temporal changes in the level of entrainment can be used as an indicator of temporal changes in the interest level of students.