It is necessary to design a legal system on the premise of an automotive vehicle. In this research, the automated level and the order of responses are variables, we will clarify the difference in the judgment on the responsibility attribution between the driver and the manufacturer when the automotive vehicle accident happened. It aimed to draw out basic information that needs consideration in designing the legal system. In Study 1, control possibility for vehicles with different automation levels was obtained, and in Study 2, responses of responsibility attribution were obtained by drivers and car manufacturers in the same accident type, when cars with different automation levels became parties. The order of response was 1 Full automation, 2 Conditional Automation, 3 Driver Assistance (FAG) and vice versa (DAG). As a result, when the level of automation became high, the controllability of the person was judged to be low, driver’s responsibility was light, manufacturer’s responsibility was heavily judged. When the response order was different, DAG judged the responsibility of the car manufacturer more heavily than FAG. There is a possibility that different anchors occurred in DAG and FAG.

View full abstract

Maintaining alertness of machine operators such as automobile drivers has become more important. We remarked auditory stimulation and considered pleasant and arousal sound stimuli. We carried out a meta-analysis about sharpness of sound based on a hypothesis that a sound with large sharpness value has an arousal effect. First, we gathered sound data with sharpness, loudness and subjective evaluation from previous research documents using sharpness. As a result of the meta-analysis about sharpness values, we clarified that there were pleasant sounds with large sharpness value above 3acum. Secondly, we made a general multiple regression equation of loudness and sharpness to estimate subjective evaluation about pleasant-unpleasant. Thirdly, we proposed a new method for estimating a semantic orientation (positive/negative impression) of a sound source by adding a positive/negative value of the word of sound and a positive/negative value of its soundclass (noise/sound/timbre). Finally, we showed a map of pleasant and arousal sounds by the estimated semantic orientations and the mean sharpness values of sound sources. We could select ‘among the mountains’, ‘a brook’ and ‘a birdsong’ as pleasant and arousal sounds and considered each use case as a sound stimulus.

View full abstract

Providing every person with opportunities to work is one of important issues in the world. In these issues, the employment of elderly persons or persons with disabilities is more important problem in Japan. Creating an inclusive society, "a society for all", is one of the best ways to improve this problem effectively. At this society, providing opportunities to learn techniques is important to support a person with disability for engineering students. In order to touch welfare situations for students, we have tackled development of an internship program and a company tour with a special subsidiary company (SSC) and a welfare organization. As results of interview surveys, we found that SSC has not only welfare values but also educational values for society. These results suggested that industry-welfare-academia collaboration is one possible way for growing welfare mind engineers.

View full abstract

Japan is accepting a number of foreign visitors in the trend of cultural diversity and building mutual understanding with who have different cultural background becomes essential. To support foreigner ’s better quality of living, we propose Internet radio “CCR (Cross-Cultural Radio) ”, which provides location-based contents including international listener ’s comments. Sequentially, “CCUS (Cross-Cultural Understanding Scale) ”was invented and evaluation experiment was conducted in Tokyo to measure the effectiveness of CCR. Experiment result illustrates that CCR is effective in certain dimensions of cross-cultural understandings. This paper intends to explore the cultural exchange amongst foreign visitors to Japan by the behavioral analysis of individual experiment participants.

View full abstract

In this study, we suggest a easy method to reason the distortion value of body of human by aging, as a new index of aging; which is "Distortion age", measured by the robot "DOCTOR’S EYE" which equip the "Kinect". As the result, we found the more significant difference of the distortion in front‐back direction of elderly participants between the standing and walking states than the distortion of young participants, and clarified the necessity of measurement of the deference for a precise evaluation of the distortion and the effectiveness of the easy measurement method of the distortion during walking, such as Kinect we applied. Also as the results of the analysis of the relationship between the aging and the physical distortion, we found the 2 kinds of positive correlations between age of the elderly participants and the depth value between the positions of head and shoulder, and between the aged and the value of differences between the depth value of standing and walking states. Finally, based on these 2 correlation, we proposed a model to estimate the "Distortion age" of elderly people for an easy engineering application.

View full abstract

In this paper, we propose a support system for substrate manufacturing workers. This system provides operation instructions on and around a substrate with projection mapping. The purpose of this system is to enable workers to produce substrates faster and more precisely in a product line which many kinds of substrates are produced. The examples of projected instructions are kinds of parts, number of parts and positions to insert parts. The projected instructions from our system change with time. Workers are required to produce a substrate by following the changing instructions. This process is expected to provide easy and rhythmical instructions for achieving faster and more precise manufacturing. To evaluate our system, we have applied the system for six months under actual product circumstance in the factory. The results show that our system reduces 12% of production time without producing reject products. We believe that this is a valuable study case that shows the effects of superimposed information in an actual product line on a long term basis.

View full abstract

Selection mechanism gestures are used in Natural User Interfaces (NUI) to designate elements in a User Interface. They usually involve simple gestures with limited interactions. Being able to use more than one gesture simultaneously increases the vocabulary of the interactions. In this paper, we present MultiX Click, a new algorithm to detect midair multi-click gestures. Our approach allows the detection of multiple midair finger clicks using a depth sensor. To show the potential of our algorithm, we implemented a midair multi-click keyboard and a midair piano that use simultaneous multi-clicks. In the midair multi-click keyboard, we mixed single and multiple clicks with the ability to retrieve the location of a click, and as a result we were able to increase the gesture vocabulary. This paper explains in detail the algorithm we used to detect multi-clicks. We also explain about some preliminary experiments for evaluating it.

View full abstract