The nutrition support team (NST) holds an important position in medical health care that specifically deals with malnutrition cases. A Mini Nutritional Assessment (MNA) is used as a standard method for judging the necessity for an NST intervention. There has been no prior examination of the measurement error and the design of measuring device necessary for assessing calf circumference (CC), an index contained in MNA. In this study, we designed a specialized, and ergonomically sound measuring tape for CC measurement. A number of factors were considered in the design of the measuring tape, including the addition of a rectangular cross to the long axis of a lower thigh, tension control of the tape, the difficulty of bending the tape and the ease of locating the maximum CC. Comparative experiments between the conventional products and the designed tape were conducted by 24 subjects. In contrast to the conventional product, the use of the designed tape resulted in a 30∼40% reduction in inner and intra individual errors, and a measuring time decrease from 17.4 to 10.3 seconds. The newly designed tape proved to be highly accurate and reliable in measuring CC, and its use will surely improve nutritional assessments.

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To prevent vehicle-pedestrian accident, this paper aimed to reveal the characteristics of unsafe driver behaviors when passing through a parked vehicle. Based on the interview with a driving instructor concerning desirable driver behavior, the lateral distance to a parked vehicle, driver's vehicle speed, and the completion timing of safety checking around a parked vehicle were used as evaluation indices. The instructor extracted unsafe driver behaviors of typical drivers with sitting on the passenger seat. These unsafe behaviors were analyzed in comparison with the instructor's behavior. The analysis revealed the characteristics of unsafe driver behaviors of typical drivers–they do not keep sufficient lateral distance, they do not decrease the speed sufficiently, and they finished a safety checking around a parked vehicle before they can see the blind spot. These unsafe driver behaviors must occur because unsafe typical drivers cannot correctly predict when a pedestrian appears that may crash against the driver's vehicle, or they cannot correctly understand how they should keep the vehicle speed and the lateral distance to a parked vehicle in order to avoid the crash. Finally, the examination of driver behavior patterns estimated the proportion of these factors in relation to the whole unsafe driver behaviors.

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It is important to establish how to rouse a human operator's attention in a manual control system, from the viewpoint of active safety. In this paper, reaction times are investigated experimentally in aurally aided visual detection tasks. As auditory lead cue stimuli, a meaningful voice pronouncing the direction where a visual target appears and a meaningless sound (sinusoidal or triangular wave) are used. Two presentation methods for each auditory stimulus are adopted: One method presents the auditory stimulus from speakers placed both sides of an experimental display at the same time (Method I). The other method presents the auditory stimulus from the speaker at the same direction as the visual target (Method II). As a result, it was found that reaction times were shortened by the meaningful voice or by the auditory stimulus presented by Method II. On the lead time when the reaction time became the shortest, the presentation of the meaningless sound made it shorter compared with that of the meaningful voice. Furthermore, a relatively shorter reaction time area on the experimental screen was affected by the difference of the auditory stimulus. Therefore, useful results concerning the presentation method of auditory stimuli for the attention rousing were obtained.

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A passenger sitting in a car expends continuous effort to stabilize the knees and feet. To alleviate that instability, a leg side support that is useful for various statures and footwear is proposed. Low walls for supporting the leg sides are installed on the seat front floor in the following conditions: they are 74 mm high, 776 – 962 mm from the seat hinge point, with distance of separating walls of 145 (near end) – 169 (far end) mm. The walls can be flattened to accommodate a tall person and passengers' entry and exit from the car. The seat has a concave front part. The 491-mm-long seat sides support the thighs of a passenger sitting with legs apart. The middle part is 439 mm long to prevent pressing the thighs of a passenger sitting with legs together. The seat gradually bows upward, with higher sides that deter passengers from sitting with thighs widened. The proposed design allows passengers of 5 – 95 percentile of women's height (wearing high heels of up to 60 mm) to maintain a sitting posture with extended legs.

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The purpose of this study was to clarify the relationship between ball velocity and joint motions during baseball pitch. Measurement devices were attached on the high back and the wrist of subjects which consisted of nine college baseball pitchers, and the angular velocities of trunk rotation, trunk forward tilt and forearm pronation during pitching were measured. The subjects threw the ball ten times with gradual increase of the ball velocity. The time of maximum angular velocity of the trunk rotation and the forearm pronation approached the time of ball-release with increase of the ball velocity. The maximum angular velocities of three joint motions highly correlated to the ball velocity. The maximum angular velocities of the trunk rotation, the trunk forward tilt and the forearm pronation highly correlated to each other, but there are poor correlations among the time of maximum angular velocities of them. From these results, it is clear that the trunk rotation and the trunk forward tilt are significant motions for increasing the ball velocity. Although the motion of the forearm pronation before and after the ball-release does not contribute to increase of ball velocity, it reflects good or bad of the whole motion of pitching. These results suggest that it is meaningful to measure the motions of forearm before and after ball-release with the sensors shown in this study.

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