People who are deaf or hard of hearing may need to use support services, such as text messaging to access information, but this depends on the condition of their hearing. However, providing captioning services to deaf or hard-of-hearing people may be difficult in a case where such people need to access information from captionists when traveling. Therefore, we proposed, built, and operated the "Mobile-Type Remote Captioning System" to solve such problems. The need for methods of expression, for use by deaf or hard-of-hearing students in communication with instructors, when using this system were investigated in this study. Results indicated that almost 60% of the students wished to use their own speech as a method of expression. In contrast, the remaining students relied on other methods, for which technical support was required.

The medical inspection which detects the early stage dementia is difficult because elderly person have a negative impression o the inspection. For this reason, the purpose of this study is to propose a screening method which can detect the dementia by using the simple olfactory identification test. Authors focused on the decrease of the olfactory function. Before the investigation, authors selected the seven odors which can be easily identified and which has not uncomfortable impression. These seven odors were selected among twelve odors that are included in OSIT-J (Odor Identification Test for Japanese). Experimental participants were eight healthy elderly people and twenty elderly people with dementia living at the nursing home. As a result, we clarified that olfactory function of elderly people with dementia is significantly lower(p < 0.003）than healthy elderly people. Furthermore, ROC （Receiver Operating Characteristic）analysis demonstrated that the investigation using seven odors has high screening capacity (AUC：Area Under the Curve = 0.95). Through these investigations results, we devised a screening method which has an accuracy of 75 percent for screening. The devised method may detect elderly people with questionable dementia more accurately by increasing the number of experimental participants.

Collective cell migration plays an important role in many physiological events, including morphogenesis, wound healing, and tumor metastasis. Although the mechanism of single cell migration has been elucidated, it is also important to develop a better understanding of collective cell migration, in which cells maintain cell-cell contacts and move collectively. In this study, we applied a template matching technique to time-lapse images of collective cell migration for quantitative analysis of the spatio-temporal movements of cells. We compared the results from the template matching technique with those from manual tracking, which was defined to be true values, and the best parameters for template matching (template image size and search image size) were decided. Using those parameters, collective cell migration of MDCK cells on glass and collagen substrates was analyzed quantitatively. As a result, MDCK cells on the collagen substrate showed higher collectiveness during migration than those on the glass substrate. This result indicates that differences in the collectiveness of cells on different substrates can be evaluated using the template matching technique; furthermore, this technique was confirmed to be a useful tool for quantitative analysis of collective cell migration.