As one of the communication support system in distant collaborative work, we are focusing on how to control external interruptions to the participants during the meeting. In this paper, we have proposed a meeting states display system to identify states of the meeting to get automatically the physical states of participants and to notify the distributed colleagues. The system mainly has the features that it can identify the state of the person you want to contact and determine the statues of meeting based on the relative states of the other participants. Our experimental results indicate the following effects. 1) The function to capture the physical states of the interrupted participant him/herself and to notify the states to distributed colleagues could be useful to reduce the number of external interruptions during the meeting. 2) Although the function to determine the statues of meeting based on the relative states of the other participants could not be helpful to reduce the number of interruptions, it could give effect to the subjective evaluation.

This study proposes a small wireless interface that measures and visualizes group dynamics in order to promote and enhance social interaction. The developed device, Enhanced Reach (ER), can be attached to sportswear or sports equipments, and it is capable of estimating geometric relationships by using the signal strength of the wireless communication between devices and their orientations. An illumination-based visualization method was developed to influence interaction within the group and encourage social interaction. We verified the performance and also evaluated the developed bibs implemented by ER between children with pervasive developmental disorders. Through experiments, we confirmed the usability of this device by children during sports and play activities and the efficacy of the proposed technology to obtain group dynamics.

Elderly people are likely to need to urinate more often than in their youth, and thus may encounter the difficult situation of searching for a restroom at inopportune moments. We are researching and developing a system that will allow elderly people who need to urinate frequently to time their trips to the bathroom to accommodate the schedules of their outings. Our proposed system calculates the intervals between urinations based upon the person's schedule and hydration levels, and recommends using the restroom well before the person feels the urge to urinate. In order to implement the system, we have devised a physiological formula for estimation a person's hydration levels through non-invasive means. Based on this estimate, we can then calculate the time between bathroom breaks. In this paper, we describe our system and show experimental results for these calculations.

This paper introduces a novel model for estimating the aspects of items that we are interested in (aspects of interest) when browsing contents. The proposed model generates items of gaze from the aspects of interest, where the aspects are characterized by associating them with attributes of items such as their specifications and appearances, and the aspects of interest are modeled by the mixtures of the aspects. Then, we can achieve aspects in a data-driven manner and represent aspects of interest flexibly via the estimation of the proposed model. Once we learn the aspects, we can also estimate the aspects of interest from newly observed gaze data. Furthermore, we incorporate influences of content layouts upon regions of gaze such as high conspicuity of center regions. Our experiments demonstrate the appropriateness of proposed model by accurately predicting items that users are interested in and likely to be looked at from estimated aspects of interest.

The goal of this study is to propose strategies for enhancing train drivers' proactive behaviors in order to maintain railway safety and service quality. To accomplish this goal, authors conducted a qualitative investigation in train drivers' workplaces by participant observation and interviewing in order to grasp the crucial factors to regulate their work behaviors. As a result of the investigation, authors suggest that each train driver's own work definition that is comprised of two dimensions; "perceived role breadth covered by each member's definition" and "orientation to pursuit and try to achieve a true goal of train driver's job", would be a core factor to regulate their daily work behaviors including proactive ones. Further authors point out that an information environment that each train driver contacts in a daily life would be one of affecting factors to maintain their role definition. Based on this suggestion, authors discussed some expected management strategies of train drivers.

Most of the people make presentations by using tools such as pointers. However, the use of information devices such as PCs and mice restrict the presenter's embodied motions and actions. In this paper, we propose a presentation support system PPTouch that can expand embodiment in presentation by using a portable touch screen device. First, we develop a prototype of the system by using an iPhone. Next, we perform the experiment to compare with conventional pointers by presenters. After that, we also perform the evaluation by participants. Both experiments show the effectiveness of PPTouch. Finally, we add functions for presentation, and publish PPTouch on Apple App Store for free.

Utilizing red as an indicator of emphasis is said to be not very effective, as red is to be recognized as very dark for protan, one of type of color vision deficiency. However, such color's psychological effects, generally called "meanings of color" or "color codes," are as effective as perceptual aspects from the viewpoint of information conveying among individuals especially with normal color vision, trichromats, so infographic designers want to utilize these effects. In this paper, we examined to what degree the color's effects (visibility, saliency, significance, danger and safety) were maintained in each trichromats, protans and deutans, and what colors would be effective to use, when we need to modify colors so that the people who have color vision deficiencies are able to differentiate the colors and to have similar meanings. We found that orange and blue gained high scores other than red in visibility and saliency in protans and deutans, on the other hand, red gained the highest score in significance and danger likewise trichromats. Additionally, there were differences between the evaluation scores in dichromats and in trichromats using a color vision simulator, especially in red. We propose re-coloring methods considering their meaning of color based on the evaluation results.

In Air Traffic Control (ATC) tasks, controllers face paradoxical demands for dealing with increasing amounts of air traffic with keeping (or enhancing) safety and efficiency. Controllers handle the demands in uncertain and variable traffic situations by their dynamic performance adjustments. Thus, controllers' working methods that constantly achieve successful air traffic operations should be understood not only from the perspective of their optimality for an existing situation but also from the perspective of their tolerance for the variability of the situation. In the present research, toward supporting training of controller trainees, an additional function for visualizing safety margin of controllers' control strategies for situational variability called Variability-Tolerance Visualizer (VTV) was developed and implemented on our process visualization tool of ATC tasks. The basic validity of VTV was demonstrated through detailed comparison between analysis results of control strategies obtained by VTV and those by ATC instructors.

Phonological awareness training is usually carried out in oral dialog. However, this style is not always effective when we consider cognitive characteristics of developmental dyslexia which frequently accompany with weakness of verbal memory or working memory. Thus we have proposed new training methods of phonological awareness which use visual images in addition to oral dialog, and developed training softwares. After training of 5-14 months, improvements were found in phonological awareness and text reading skills of four participants with developmental dyslexia. Consequently, it is suggested that our training methods for phonological awareness with visual images were effective in the training for children with difficulty in phonological awareness and text reading skills.