The unprecedented Great East Japan earthquake (Mw9.0) that occurred at 2:46 pm on March 11, 2011, and the Iwaki City was severely hit by this earthquake. But the disaster prevention consciousness of the citizens of Iwaki have deteriorated with years. We conducted a questionnaire survey in 2015 targeting 819 people of Iwaki. The purpose of this study is to elucidate the disaster prevention consciousness of the citizens. As a result, the disaster prevention consciousness is still little known and the education for disaster prevention, including ICT is very important for improving the disaster prevention consciousness.

View full abstract

Telework is a flexible way to separate time and location from function. This study observes telework from the perspective of area activation and business continuity planning. When the percentage of teleworkers becomes high, a problem emerges in that it becomes difficult for workers to see shared situations. There are also reports that a sense of togetherness in the workplace is damaged. To address this problem, telework needs to use ultra and meta-realistic telework communication systems capable of recreating the office atmosphere. These systems recreate the office atmosphere through sound and video and offer a shared environment for communication. This kind of system has been developed to encourage a sense of togetherness and cooperation. This paper describes the development of ultra-realistic telework communication systems in a consignment study from the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology. We created an evaluation grid targeting remote communication, using a mental model approach based on individual structural theory, and settled on an evaluation method for remote communication suitable for an ultra-realistic telework communication system. We used this method in experiments and estimated the quality of remote communication. We found that a sense of togetherness was accomplished by using this system.

View full abstract

In this paper, we proposed a system which combines two extant positioning systems, which are extant Wi-Fi and PDR (Pedestrian Dead Reckoning) with the smartphone. In the proposed method, we mainly use PDR, and combine a proximity-based correction using several Wi-Fi access points. The PDR uses three sensors, the magnetometer, the accelerometer, and the pressure sensor. The pressure sensor enables the estimate of 3D positions. Also, the proposed system solves the error accumulation in PDR by using the correction by Wi-Fi, and by limiting the use of Wi-Fi to the case where the RSS (Received Signal Strength) is large, we reduced the errors that occur from attenuation. We conducted three walking experiments to evaluate our proposed method. First, we estimated the reciprocating motion on a straight line by PDR. We confirmed that the azimuth angle and distance were estimated well. Next, we walked in an N-shaped route. In the estimation, the error accumulated and the estimated position gradually departed from the actual path by PDR. The error in the last position was reduced to 0.52 m, using our proposed method. Although the error was also accumulated by PDR when performing 3D moving, the error was corrected using the proposed method, and the average error reached 1.85 m, and the maximum error was reduced to 4.23 m. From these results, we conclude that our proposed method is efficient for navigation without any specialized preparation.

View full abstract