Studies on intelligent transport systems, which target adults as users, have been actively developed: One of the examples is a navigation system using electronic maps. However, for children of a third and under grade elementary students, it is difficult to read a map and use such a system. This paper proposes a route indication system using the smartphone vibration function for children who are not used to reading maps. When a user turns a device equipped with this system, the direction to a previously set target point is indicated by the smartphone vibrations. In the course of development of the proposed system, a preliminary experiment was conducted to evaluate the necessary optimal angle degree to a direction to a target point. The result showed that a variation of 20 degrees towards the desired destination was optimal to navigate to any target point. Using this parameter in our system, an experiment was conducted with 6 children. The results of this experiment showed that the children were able to easily use the proposed system and reach the target destination.

View full abstract

Driver distraction is recognized as a serious problem and is associated with a substantial proportion of traffic accidents. In this article, we report on the development and evaluation of a near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) system for driver distraction detection. We observed an increase in the oxyhemoglobin signals measured on the forehead during sustained attention to response task (SART) error. In the case of SART error, reaction time tended to decrease. We confirmed the change of oxyhemoglobin signal and the change of reaction time accompanying the distraction. Based on these results, we propose that driver distraction could be evaluated using the developed NIRS device.

View full abstract

The enhancement of resilience of individuals and organizations is expected to address the limitations of traditional safety approach. Many studies in resilience engineering domain are conducted with the collaboration of expert practitioner. Although such collaborative studies are important, it is difficult to perform repetitive experiments using professional participants especially in the early stage of research. This study, therefore, has developed experimental tasks and simulator requiring participants’ resilient performance by reference to the commander’s tasks of firefighting. The developed simplified firefighting simulator has been used in a cognitive experiment. In the experiment, the performance differences in terms of responding time to various events, resource management, and risk of spreading fire, between highperformance participants and low-performance participants have been successfully observed. This fact indicates that the developed simulator can be suitable and useful for the experimental research on resilience.

View full abstract

For maintaining resilience of socio-technical systems, it is believed that knowledge sharing among practical ?eld staffs should be a crucial. The purpose of this study, therefore, is to propose a new method to enhance their knowledge sharing effectively. Especially, authors focused on their chats in a refresh room and developed a method to promote their job-related chats in a refresh room by using a large size touch panel display presenting a lot of job-related information. Authors conducted the experiments to examine the effect of developed method. As a result, the expected effect was observed approximately while some possible limitations related to characteristics of job and human relationship among target members were captured. In the conclusion, future works are discussed.

View full abstract

In the present study, the effect of the existence of written procedures for the task performance to manage unexpected situations has been evaluated using simulation environment of a smart grid. Scenarios for expected situation have been constructed based on the events that have not been presented to subjects in advance. Subjects have been divided into two groups. Subjects in group A are not given written procedure that enables effective operation for the predefined situations, while subjects in group B have been instructed to follow the procedure strictly. The results imply that the task performance evaluated based on the number of causing blackout degrades for the subjects following procedure when they face the unexpected situations.

View full abstract

Because many veteran operators retired in chemical industries, it is very important to educate and train efficiently novice operators to have the basic operation skills. The authors conducted two kinds of experiments using a semi-scale thermal power plant emulator to investigate the factors to induce violations and to evaluate the applicability of a training manual with a checklist of operation steps. The results related with operation errors including the violations of operation rules such as finger and calling, sitting on a chair at maneuvering on the operation panel, etc. showed different tendency between the experiments. This paper compares the numbers and types of operation errors in the two operation experiments to investigate the causes of the difference. The comparison results suggest that pointing out operation errors after the completion of an operation task has positive effect for acquiring basic operation skills.

View full abstract

We investigated how an air conditioner’s status of operation as indicated by color affects thermal perception during continuous changes in room temperature. First, the colors that properly indicate the operation status of the air conditioner at various room temperatures were determined. Then, thermal perception was measured with and without colors for indicating the air conditioner’s operation status while the room temperature progressively changed from a high temperature to a comfortable state. Results showed that, at the beginning and the end of the experiment, subjects felt cooler when the status of the air conditioner operation was being indicated than when it was not indicated. This suggests that transition of thermal perception is modulated by color information showing the status of air conditioner operation.

View full abstract

Destination Oriented Allocation System for Elevator was developed to improve the operational efficiency of elevators of high rise buildings. Not only the improving operational efficiency, but the improving accessibility is necessary for persons with disability. The aim of this study is to consider how to adapt Destination Oriented Allocation System for their accessibility. In this study, we focused to reduce the load that the persons with visual impaired or lower limb disorders include wheelchair users are experiencing in the conventional elevator system and potentially feel in Destination Oriented Allocation System. We had the subjective evaluation as factors the relative position of hall operation panel toward the elevator cars, congestion rate and the allowable waiting time. The results showed that it was able to reduce the load of using for persons with disabilities when the system allocated them the cars that were closest from the hall operation panel or less than 30% in congestion rate.

View full abstract

Mixed Reality (MR) is the technology that combines real and virtual world in real time. In MR space, the appearance of real object can be changed by superimposing the computer-generated image. We have been investigating the multi/cross-modal mechanism between sense of vision and touch in MR space. Up to now, we have confirmed that a real object (rigid) with a virtual liquid object can affect weight perception depending on liquid volume. When superimposing a virtual liquid object on a real object that contains water, it is expected that volume estimation can be changed depending on virtual liquid volume. In this paper, we focus on how people estimate volume, and verify the influence of virtual liquid volume in the MR environment. The results of the experiments, we revealed that volume estimation was affected by virtual liquid volume.

View full abstract

In order to improve intellectual concentration, few studies have verified the effect of indoor airflow among the thermal environment conditions, and the differences in effects have not been studied based on the season. In this study, an experiment was conducted to investigate the influence of a room airflow in winter on intellectual concentration. As a result, no significant difference of intellectual concentration was found between a condition with airflows and a condition without airflows. The thermal sensation vote showed that the airflows caused the participants to feel colder and it is the same as the results of an experiment in summer, although the intellectual concentration was not improved in winter. In addition, covariance structure analysis was carried out to analyze the effects for intellectual concentration. The participants were classified into two groups. A group improved intellectual concentration by the airflows and another group did not improve it. The former group showed that the airflows caused the comfortable feeling of the room and the latter group showed the airflows caused the feeling of coldness. It was shown that different persons like different airflows from the results. One of our future challenges is to provide each person a controllable airflow.

View full abstract

One of the important aspects of the history learning is to learn lessons from historical events and to make use of them in the present life. However, current history learning focuses on knowing historical events, not discovering lessons. Our research introduces the learning activity of the lesson discovery into the history learning in order to understand the importance of acquiring living knowledge from history. We call this learning the “learning from history.” Lesson discovery needs complicate knowledge process: generalization of individual historical events, understanding causal relationships between historical events, and noticing similarities between them. This study proposes a learning process for promoting the lesson discovery which consists of 4 steps. In addition, a learning support system is developed which provides the interface that decreases the difficulty of this learning process and leads learners for the successful lesson discovery. Experimental results indicated that the lesson discovery learning with our system was positively accepted by the learners, which makes them realize this learning meaningful and useful. In addition, our system was able to give appropriate scaffolding of this learning process to the learners and effectively promote them to discover lessons.

View full abstract