Human communication in our normal lives is formed by verbal and non-verbal communication(for example, changing facial expression, body lauguage and speaking). If useful information needed to human communication does not exist, then not only communication becomes difficult but also life saving information may be unavailable. Patients with respirator(for example, injury to the throat)can not speak . While they cannot have voice communication with their doctors, nurses or families, treatment therapy and nursing decisions become difficult. In earlier times, instead of voice, patients communicated by means of writing. But this method required hard mental and physical work of patients. In addition, the longer the therapeutic period, the more speaking ability declines. This lengthens the period of rehabilitation. Medical treatment relies on voice communication between a patient, a medical doctor and a nurse. To support this communication, we developed a lip-reading system. We measured the changes of intraoral shadow area every1/30second during speaking a sentence and transformed them into a lip pattern on this system. We used20senteces in the experiment. Lip patterns were used for pattern recognition by a neural network. The rate of correct recognition for a normal subject and a patient was79.8%and55.6%, respectively. This system using only simple process provided good performance. We think, not only intraoral area, addtional information(for example, using respiratory flow from respirator and using shape of lip movement)can make the rate of correct recognition higher.

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A new convenient and easy method to measure a knee motion angle is proposed in this paper. Knee motion angle is measured from image analysis in proposed method. A digital still camera is used as an input device. Knee joint is not a point. The motion analysis of the joint is difficult, since the knee motion is constructed by sliding and rotation. A small group analysis is defined in the new method. By using the analysis, the knee motion angle was measured in low error rate. The new method is also easy to measurement. The system can be constructed in low cost. Using the method in a residence as a daily rehabilitation, knee trouble of the aged can be reduced.

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In order to listen to recorded speeches quickly or slowly(compared to normal speed), it is necessary to change the playback speed of player. Since the speech wavefbrms are compressed or expanded in time axis according to the playback speed, this operation obviously causes damage to tone quality of voice, individuality of speaker, and understanding of the recorded speech. To fix the quality of the affbcted speech, there are two approaches, namely, cutting or pasting of these damaged wavefbrms in time domain and correcting the shi fted tone in frequency domain. The latter approach has advantages in holding frequency features of the speech through the process. Weh have been investigating a method of the approachin which the instantaneous frequency of signal is modifiable to any value. In this paper, this method is introduced and simulation results are discussed. In the results, both individuality of speaker and understanding of the recorded speech are almost fixed.

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