A typing driven embodied entrainment character chat system “InterChat” has been developed by introducing an enhanced iRT (InterRobot Technology) model that can create motions where the communicative motions and actions can be generated easily from both the typing rhythms and the meaning of the words of sending and receiving messages. In this paper, focusing on the display process of input messages, we develop display methods for a new character chat system where the typing is displayed in real time in the form of dot or character strings between all participants. The effectiveness of the methods is demonstrated by sensory evaluation experiments conducted in chat communication scenario.

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We have proposed SenseChair, an office chair-shaped sensing device that enables to detect body sway actions of a sitting user by using its embedded four pressure sensors for estimation of user’s situation and condition. In this paper, we propose a novel method to detect physical synchrony among multiple sitting users during a conversation by using multiple SenseChairs. We acquired data from a group conversation experiment employing idea generation task. A short-time frequency analysis with Hanning window function was carried out to extract the short-time frequency data of each participant’s body sway during the group conversation. We calculated the value of synchrony from the sway data of when all participants’ movement were synchronized in the frequency-domain. Results showed that the value of synchrony when the ideas were generated was significantly higher than the other times. Further, we found a significant association between the calculated value of synchrony and the quantity and quality of ideas, and participant’s subjective feelings rated by post-conversation questionnaires. These results support feasibility of an automatic detection of synchrony among multiple users from their synchronized sway behaviors.

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Improvement of mental health of workers has recently attracted much attention because it is strongly associated with the reduction of healthcare expenses. The critical changes in mental conditions leading to the development of diseases, such as psychiatric disorders, would be signaled by alterations in psycho-physiological states or habitual behaviors in daily life. Therefore, their accurate evaluation and continuous monitoring might be essential for the management of mental health. Meanwhile, a variety of factors, such as labor conditions or environments, personal relations at work, affect mental conditions in workers. Thus, the integrated monitoring and analysis of these information is also required. In this study, we used a smartphone data collector capable of Ecological Momentary Assessment, which is recognized as a gold standard method with having a higher ecological validity, to record subjective symptoms of workers in daily life. In addition, behavioral and physiological information of workers and their surrounding environmental information were simultaneously measured (about 200 workers; about 1 week). We show the utility of multilevel modeling approaches by showing some examples analyzed by using the large-scale hierarchical data set collected in this study.

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The purpose of this study was to examine the psycho-physiological effects of respiratory control using vibration stimuli based on biological signals. We monitored changes in physiological indexes, the alpha attenuation coefficient (AAC), area S of the Lorenz plot (LP-area-S), heart rate (HR), and respiration as objective parameters, and Roken Arousal Scale (RAS) and Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) scores as subjective parameters in participants performing mental or physical load tasks. According to the results of the VAS scores and respiratory control rate, all participants felt fatigue and were able to breathe at a rate that was very close to the target rate in all periods. According to the results of the AAC and LP-area-S, changes in autonomic- and central nervous systems with respiratory control under mental or physical load were of the same tendency but varied in magnitude. In conclusion, the results of this experiment show that respiratory control can elicit physiological and psychological changes associated with relaxation. Moreover, the appropriate respiratory pattern will depend on the type of load.

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The purpose of this study was to identify the suitable velocity to move a camera platform without VE (virtual environment) sickness by using eye-gaze input. We developed a simulation environment using a panoramic photograph. In this simulation, eye-gaze was turned to a display to be scrolled. We asked participants to perform a visual search task under three different velocity conditions. We measured the physiological response, task performance, and a subjective evaluation. Based on these results, the way to design the system was determined.

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Voice recognition technologies are widely applied to the general-purpose devices, such as car navigation systems or mobile phones. However, cognitive-loads of voice operations have not been discussed sufficiently. Since it is necessary to translate a command to a verbal phrase, cognitive-loads of voice operations for simple tasks may become higher than those of manual operations. In this study, we analyzed microsaccade rates to compare the cognitive-loads between voice and manual operations objectively. Subjects performed a parafoveal transition detection task of a geometry pattern in which they responded by their voice or mouse clicks. We also evaluated the task performances of simultaneously imposed an RSVP (Rapid Serial Visual Presentation) task to estimate effects on cognitive distractions. The results show that microsaccade rates increase synchronously with the timing of voice responses, and task performances of the RSVP task decline immediately after voice responses compared with the results of manual responses. These findings suggest that voice operations have an effect to disengage subjects' attention from visual targets, and this attentional disengagement might cause the cognitive distraction of gazing objects.

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In order to estimate driver's implicit safety attitude, the present study applies an implicit association test (IAT), which is one of the methods to measure unconscious mindset. First, an advanced Japanese IAT (AJIAT) was proposed based on four design guidance to solve the problems of a conventional Japanese IAT (JIAT) to measure driver's implicit safety attitude. Next, an experiment for comparing two types of IATs and a driving simulator experiments were performed to verify that the AJIAT has a better ability to estimate the driver's safe driving behavior than the conventional JIAT.

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A long-standing challenge in video-mediated communication systems is to represent a remote participant’s gaze direction in local environments correctly. To address this issue, we developed ThirdEye, an add-on eye-display for a video communication system. This display is made from an artificial ulexite (TV rock) that is cut into a hemispherical shape, enabling light from the bottom surface to be projected onto the hemisphere surface. By drawing an appropriate ellipse on an LCD and placing ThirdEye over it, this system simulates an eyeball. Our experiments proved that an observer could perceive a remote Looker's gaze direction more precisely when the gaze was presented using ThirdEye compared to the case in which the gaze was presented using the Looker's face on a flat display.

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