SPRING DRIVE Cal.7R the world was heralded, and it was commercialized in December, 1999. Cal.7R is electron speed control style mechanical watch which raised the time accuracy taking the mainspring as a power by electronic speed control. ^<1)>We report necessary winding-up lock mechanism and stopping hand movement mechanism in Cal.7R development.

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A wearable multi-channel sensing unit was successfully developed as pre-evaluation or research tool for a healthcare system. Three-axis acceleration sensors were installed in the unit. Eight analogue signals for bio or environmental information and two serial signals through RS232C I/O ports for GPS could be recorded to a Compact Flash interface compatible removable memory(for example, IBM Microdrive^<TM> 1GB HDD). Size and weight of the unit were 207cm^3(9cm×7.2cm×3.2cm)and 260grams. Continuous ECG waveforms could be clearly recorded for more than 150 minutes using Lithium-ion battery(7.2V, 2700mAh).

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Recently, shape memory alloy(SMA) has been marked as material of the actuator for micro-mechanism system. It is well known that the sheet of the material has higher sensitivity to temperature change than wire or bulk materials, advantageous as the material for microactuator. However, the study on the characteristics of the sheet against temperature has not been conducted very much yet. Then this paper deals with the heating performance of the sheet by a new method. In this method, a pulse width modulated electric current was used to heat the sheet material and the heating performance of the method was evaluated by analyzing temperature distribution of the sheet. The temperature of the sheet was measured by the usage of infrared temperature. The results showed that the temperature distribution is homogeneous throughout the surface of the sheet indicating practical applicability of the method to a microactuator system with the SMA sheet.

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An optical fiber array is an optical communication device that consists of multi-core optical fibers and a V-grooved substrate. Due to the use of DWDM systems, the demand for optical fiber arrays has increased significantly. In this research, for the mass production of optical fiber arrays, we considered and proposed technology that automates the insertion of fiber into the V groove. First, we figured out the positioning accuracy necessary to insert the fiber inside the V groove by considering the lateral offset and the angular offset of the fiber's fixed end. Next, we measured the relative positions of the fiber and the V groove with a CCD camera, and developed a positioning mechanism that allows the fiber to move within a certain allowable range. Therefore, we developed an automatic assembly machine that accurately inserts two ribbon fibers, each with 12 cores, into a 24-core V-grooved substrate.

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[in Japanese]

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