The purpose of this study is to construct basics for clarifying the process of skill acquisition from the viewpoint of eye-hand coordination and writing pressure. The information obtained from the eye-gaze is essential for the determination of physical movements in any work. The calligraphy was selected and analyzed as an example of eye-hand coordination. Eye-gaze position, location of brush tip and writing pressure of expert and novice participants were measured using the system which consist of an eye mark recorder, a three-dimensional position-orientation measurement device and a writing pressure measurement device. An attempt was made to extract the skilled element by examining whether the relationships between line of eye-gaze and brush tip stroke, and between brush tip stroke and writing pressure were different between novices and skilled experts. Consequently, a significant difference between two skill groups was found in the relationship between brush stroke and line of eye gaze, and between brush stroke and writing pressure. Different from novices, experts were found to be outstanding in the following two perspectives: (1) eye movement preceding to brush tip, and (2) modulated brush stroke. Thus, the two features above were demonstrated to be essential elements for the skill acquisition.

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We propose a new communication system by which niche people can obtain cross-cutting information and communicate with other people based on each personality. The system graphically displays the degree and direction of other people's hobbies who are interested in the keyword niche people input, and relation between the knowledge e.g. movies, music, animation, history, geography using nodes. So, we can search friends who have similar interest and direction in hobbies. From the demonstration experiments, we obtained good results that the system could help niche people to gain and exchange useful information.

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We developed a new aramid-fiber white cane that is lightweight, resistant to breakage, and reduces injury caused by the cutting surface. This paper presents the results of evaluating the cane strength and the load on a user's muscles by comparing the new cane (aramid-fiber) with an existing one (carbon-fiber). Six male subjects participated in an experiment analyzing physical load reduction, in which the participants were required to wave a cane for 10 min using only wrist movement in a standing position. The surface electromyogram of five forearm muscles and the mental workload of the upper limb were analyzed. The results indicated that the new aramid-fiber white cane reduced the physical load on the muscles (flexor carpi radialis muscle, extensor carpi radialis muscle, flexor carpi ulnaris muscle, pronator teres muscle) by about 10~40% in comparison with the carbon-fiber white cane. However, the physical load on the extensor carpi ulnaris muscle, which is used during wrist extension, increases by about 30%.

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In this research, we applied morphological analysis to abstract the psychological information of writer. Chasen is a Japanese software for morphological analysis. Two types of texts are evaluated. (1) Explanation of the outline of well-known accident or trouble. (2) Author's impression about the accident or trouble. Frequencies of verb, adjective, adverb, Rentaishi, conjunction, particle, auxiliary verb and exclamation are compared in both texts. It was found that the frequency of adverb is higher in the author's impressions. The tf-idf of adverb was also examined. it was found that the tf-idfs of adverbs belong to two groups are significantly different.

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Although human beings are capable of discerning a variety of textures through the sense of touch, there is as yet no consensus as to how best to classify those textures. To resolve this problem, we proposed a novel method of categorizing tactile textures using onomatopoeic words in Japanese. Based on the impressions they evoke, onomatopoeic words pertaining to tactile sensations are distributed on a two-dimensional space, making it possible to visualize how different tactile sensations are related to one another. Combining the results obtained with the subjects' evaluations of the materials touched in terms of how pleasant or unpleasant they find those materials, this paper attempts to visualize on a two-dimensional space the relationship between the pleasantness/unpleasantness associated with the materials and the tactile sensations that they evoke.

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It has often been pointed out that it is difficult for those without any scientific background to understand the experimental data on gait analysis. Thus, we introduced a linguistic approach of “onomatopoeias” in order to explain gait analysis in plain words while taking advantage of Lissajous figures as a scientific and quantitative way. In this research we used three onomatopoeias; “DosunDosun (clomp)”, “SutaSuta (walk briskly)”, “YochiYochi (toddle)”, whose sounds turned out to be useful for all kinds of people to have common understandings of their gait motions. And Lissajous figures enabled us to visualize gait acceleration data and to evaluate them in a more quantitative way. The linguistic approach of “onomatopoeias” and the graphic approach of “Lissajous figures” supplement each other and it is considered that the combination of the two approaches is a useful gait analysis method.

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This paper proposes a kansei-aware landscape picture creating system from natural language sentence. The proposed system creates a landscape picture by focusing on nouns. In the system, several concepts such as “sea” and “sky” and their many graphical parts are stored. Semantic estimation among input words plays an important role in the creating of a meaningful image representation of the input sentence. We use Google N-gram to cope with this issue, a lexical resource. As a result, restrictions on the input sentences can be greatly weakened and relevant constituents can be selected. In addition, the proposed system can express sense of season by selecting appropriate graphic parts with suitable color to the input sentence. Furthermore, the relation between colors and adjectives is also considered in the proposed system to reflect kansei aspects of the input sentence. Evaluation experiments have been carried out to show the effectiveness of the proposed system.

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This paper describes the relationships between the speaker's intended emotion and the prosodic features of the emotional Japanese speech. The purpose of this study is to clarify how much the speaker's intention is correctly conveyed to the listener, and what are the prosodic-feature parameters that can convey the speaker's emotion definitely. Listening tests are conducted using speech samples that consist of “neutral” speech as well speech with three types of emotions (“anger”, “joy”, and “sadness”) of three degrees (“light”, “medium”, and “strong”). We use 120-word speech samples uttered by 4 announcers, and 144-word speech samples uttered by 4 radio actors/actresses. Results are summarized as follows. The agreement rate of the listener's receptivity with the speaker's intention for speech uttered by radio actors/actresses is higher than that for speech uttered by announcers. There are significant differences between prosodic-feature parameters of emotional speech uttered by announcers and those uttered by radio actors/actresses.

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Corporate websites have become an indispensable part of corporate activities. These websites have such functions as providing system infrastructure for sending/receiving information, delivering content and distributing product information by e-mail or member's site, or assisting the transition of corporate marketing techniques in response to changes in the internal/external environment. The purpose of this study is to clarify the ways and processes by which corporate website design has been changed in response to environmental changes and to leave a record of the transition. In this study, the Official Website of Mitsubishi Electric Corporation will be used to analyze the purpose, concept and measures taken to a transition of a corporate website in the face of changes to laws, standards, technologies, market needs and internal needs. Examples are based on internal documents of Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, and interviews with relevant persons.

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The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of clothing pressure on physiological and psychological responses, to create an evaluating method of the clothing comfort. We have investigated the physiological and psychological responses to the clothing pressure in both situations which eyes open and eyes closed. The pressure amounting to 90% of the subjects' waist size was applied to their abdominal region by the waist belt. The influence of clothing pressure on physiological and psychological responses were evaluated by the following measurements: sensory test, electrocardiogram, electroencephalogram and blood pressure. Consequently, when subjects were fastened by waist belt, sympathetic nerve activity increased in case of eyes closed. On the other hand, parasympathetic nerve activity increased in case of eyes open. The physiological and psychological responses are different in eyes closed and eyes open conditions. The results mean that the clothing comfort on the pressure requires a sensory multimodality evaluation.

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According to previous studies, highly understandable painting is generally associated with favorable evaluations. This study investigated the contribution of understandability to the combination effect of painting and frame. Using eight combinations, the degrees of harmony and impression (evaluation, activity) were rated. It was found that when a highly understandable painting was combined with a regular and symmetrical frame, the degree of harmony and evaluation were higher than if the painting was combined with an irregular and complex frame. In contrast, a poorly understandable painting harmonized with both types of frames and their evaluation only slightly differed. The results indicated that the aesthetic appreciation of art is affected by the frame and that a highly understandable painting is harmonized only in a regular and symmetrical frame that does not impinge on the prototypicality of the painting.

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Recently, many tactile guide maps have been installed at various public facilities. Tactile guide map designers have used raised dot patterns to express drawings on a tactile guide map. However, we are lacking quantitative data regarding raised dot patterns for the design of easily understandable tactile maps. In this study, we investigated the influence of dot distances on discrimination of dot patterns used in tactile guide maps by conducting an experiment to find highly discriminable combinations of dot patterns by comparing pairs of dot patterns. The results showed that combinations of dot patterns with a larger difference in dot distances had higher discriminability. When the differences were the same, the combinations of wider dot distances had lower discriminability. Dot patterns with more than 5.0 mm differences in dot distances were highly discriminable for sighted persons, whereas those with more than 4.0 mm differences were highly discriminable for blind persons.

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We investigated optimal vibrating conditions for inducing illusory elbow extension movement to develop various practical applications. The experimental factors were the vibration frequency (30, 50, and 70 Hz), vibration amplitude (three phases for each frequency condition), and contact press force (3, 5, 7, 9 N). We subjectively assessed the presence or absence of an illusion, and the vividness on a five-point scale. The results of this study showed that when the vibration amplitude and contact press force became higher than certain values at vibration frequencies of 50 or 70 Hz, the illusion was produced for 80% or more participants, and the vividness of the illusion was increased. Under these stimulation conditions, illusory elbow extension movement can be easily produced; we can develop an interface device that will only provide kinesthetic sensations without the actual motion. Such an interface device can be used for rehabilitation and education fields, and gaming devices.

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Fabric hand is one of the most important functions that cloth diapers can have, as well as water absorption and water retention capability. In order to clarify the condition for further improvements in fabric hand of dobby texture diapers, in this study, we carried out sensory evaluation tests using 4 samples with different materials (cotton vs. PET), different classes (filament yarn vs. spun yarn), and different yarn counts. Consequently, it suggests that PET is more effective than cotton, and No.20 count yarn works better than No.30 in improving fabric hand. As for the yarn type, we could not find any absolute superiority or inferiority because spun yarn outperforms in softness sensation and filament yarn in thermal sensation. However, filament yarn proves to gain superiority in thermal sensation on wet condition, which is considered very important for diaper.

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