State-of-the-art brain machine interfaces (BMIs) have achieved the outstanding progress in the information transfer rate. However, most BMIs are not still available for severely disabled persons who are unable to control the eye movement as well as the muscles throughout the body. The purpose of the present study is to develop a novel BMI available in the eyes-closed state using modulation of steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) associated with mental focusing on flicker stimuli. Twelve normal males aged 21-22 years old participated in the EEG measurements. The mean amplitude of SSVEP in the eyes-closed state was significantly reduced over the parietal and occipital electrode sites by mentally focusing on the flicker stimuli under the stimulus conditions of the flickering frequency of 10 Hz and the stimulus intensity of 5 lx. Such modulation was sustained at least eight times. Reinforcement of the reproducibility of the amplitude modulation in the mental focus and the amplitude recovery in the relaxed without focusing may lead to develop the BMI based on the modulation of SSVEP independently of eye-movement and eye-gaze.

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Utterance is very important for us to communicate with others. However, many people have speech handicaps and can’t produce utterance smoothly. They mainly rely on writing and sign language for communication. But they are not easy skills for them to master. In order to help them, we developed a new utterance support system which can function through an information terminal. We made predictions which includes two additional functions of fixed phrase dictionary and the class 2-gram – one of the statistical approaches for processing natural language. Fixed phrase dictionary includes phrases often used in our daily life conversations and class 2-gram uses co-occurrence frequencies of parts of speech in Japanese. There are two purposes for us to use class 2-gram, one is to generate next candidates and the other is to change frequency. We concluded two evaluation experiments. The results show that our system needs less numbers of inputs in helping with written utterance production and using our prototype permits us to input more characters in one minute than using iPhone IME. Hereafter, we intend to create more effective dictionaries and develop new GUI to make our system more effective and faster.

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We propose a novel configuration of magnetic bearing for left ventricular assist device (LVAD) to realize simple and small LVAD. The magnetic bearing consists of a cylindrical stator with an inner ring and an outer ring and a rotor. The magnetic bearing and a displacement sensor have a hollow as a flow channel. In order to simplify the system, the magnetic bearing has the one axis controlled rotor in the axial direction. The displacement sensor coil in the axial direction is put in the center of stator. In this study, the displacement sensor is applied to the magnetic bearing and investigated. Magnetic field analysis was performed in order to evaluate magnetic flux of permanent magnet and force in the axial direction. Some experiments for levitation and rotation were performed.

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Housework is very hard work. The work of folding laundry is one of them. This paper discusses an automatic T-shirt folding robot that we have developed. After you take a T-shirt out of the washing machine and put it on a specially-developed hanger to dry, our robot folds the T-shirt in a completely automatic way. It can also detect whether the T-shirt is dry enough to be folded and put away. In addition, our robot is able to continuously fold a plurality of T-shirts. We hope our robot will be able to help ease some burden of everyday housework.

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