We live under various stresses every day. Serious stress can have adverse effects on the body and mind and must be addressed before it leads to major illness or accidents. Therefore, in this paper, we realized by a normal RGB camera to extract hemoglobin pigment and shadow component from the RGB image of the skin, and the separated hemoglobin pigment component video is used as the pulse wave. Since the shadow component is also separated, robust measurement of lighting fluctuations (change in shadow component) is realized. This method can be used in practical scenes indoors and outdoors.

When consumers select cosmetics, they judge whether the product match their preferences using their five senses, especially smell, vision and touch. Thus, it is very important to understand the olfactory, visual and tactile factors that the consumer desires in order to develop optimal products. As the tactile experience that consumers desire is expressed verbally, it is not trivial to understand the specific underlying tactile sensations. Therefore, we have developed original tactile sensors for tactile experiences of cosmetics and, using these sensors, we have quantified the consumers’ tactile sensations. In this paper, I’ll introduce two of these sensors: a softness sensor system that can measure perceived skin softness when fingers push skin, and a wearable contact force sensor that uses the force of grasping cosmetics to estimate the tactile sensation of cosmetics.

Humans can sense five basic tastes, sweet, bitter, sour, salty, and umami. Receptors for each basic taste quality are thought to be expressed in separate populations of taste bud cells. Humans also possess orosensory mechanisms to detect compounds that do not elicit any basic tastes. Some foods are known to have taste sensation that cannot be explained by the five basic tastes alone, such as continuity, mouthfulness and thickness. It was demonstrated that these sensations are evoked by the addition of kokumi substances, flavor modifiers that have no taste themselves. We recently demonstrated that the orally administered agonists/modulators of calcium-sensing receptor (CaSR) affect these orosensory perception that cannot be explained by the five basic tastes. For instance, in human sensory studies, CaSR activators, Ca²⁺ and γ-glutamyl peptides enhance the intensities of umami, sweet, and salty tastes in a CaSR-dependent manner. Furthermore, we found the positive correlation between CaSR activity and taste enhancing effect of kokumi substances. We conclude that calcium-sensing receptor (CaSR) is involved in kokumi substances perception. In this review, we also show that CaSR activating peptide, γ-Glu-Val-Gly is the potent kokumi substance and would be useful for improving the flavor of foods.