Production regions of the Atractylodes lancea rhizome have been inferred from the componential pattems of the plant, which belongs to the aster family. A new analytic method referred to as the RT method, which uses as many unit spaces as there are subjects, as in character recognition or personal identification,was applied to the pattern concept. As a result, it was found that comparison of the distance variance of the adjoint matrix enabled a determination to be made of the level of distinguishability, which will lead to further progress in quality control of medicinal materials.

The effectiveness of the MT system in the diagnosis of liver disease has been previously reported, but the MT system has several limitations and cannot always be employed. For example, the analysis fails when multicollinearity is present, or when all the data for a given item have the same value(σ=0). This report presents a diagnostic technique using the more general T method of analysis, and considers differences from the MT system. The T method is shown to be capable of performing the same type of diagnosis as the MT system.

The practice of starting to treat diabetes only after the condition is discovered in a health checkup has become outdated; interest now focuses on prevention. Diabetes causes many vascular complications and, besides lowering the patient's quality of life (QOL), raises medical costs so much that it has been called the 'malignant tumor of medical expenses' by medical economists. Predicting the onset of diabetes before it occurs and preventing it by lifestyle modification would greatly benefit both society and the individual. In this study, by using the MT method to analyze health checkup data and lifestyle information over a period of years to see if current blood glucose levels could be predicted several years in advance, we obtained reasonable estimates, and then proceeded to predict blood glucose depression effects by estimating and studying trends in levels of significant factors and effects of intervention. Effective interventions were selected and their effectiveness was confirmed.

Due to diversification of beverage products, higher functionality is required of canned beverage vending machines, while vending machine manufacturers urgently need to reduce development time and costs. Vending racks for vending machines are conventionally developed by making a prototype and conducting vending operation tests, but this is an inefficient sequential method. In this study, we attempted to speed up the development process and reducing problems in the field by optimal parameter design of the damper segment, focusing on the falling behavior of canned products in the vending racks, behavior which the damper segment is intended to stabilize. Falling cans were photographed with a high-speed video camera, their instantaneous tilt angles were measured, and the S/N ratio was calculated with tilt angle treated as a smaller-is-better characteristic. Design parameters that minimized the tilt angle were found,manufacturing was able to begin in a relatively short time, and problems in the field were reduced by about a half.

When online quality engineering is applied to a production line, since the customer's profit is considered and losses that do not show up in the account books are optimized, reductions in accounted costs and defect rates, which are the conventional indicators, are obtained as corporate profits. The application of online quality control necessarily entails taking the point of view of the customer and the market, which is shown to affect finances in the end. In the process of making the total application of online quality engineering in large numbers of manufacturing processes into a strategic goal, important factors for success have become visible, such as the definition of a system that is not affected by the opinions of managers and team leaders. Problems related to the behavior of people in execution (issuing instructions, and providing education and motivation), which is one of the functions of management, have also been clarified. Results have included the appearance of lines that were like the model lines that preceded them in that some lines are free of worker defects and some are not.

Mechanical parts almost always perform their function in some type of dynamic environment, so it is important to take countermeasures to vibration early in the development process. Under present circumstances, however, the complexity of the phenomena and the doubtful advisability of investing in prototype experiments with large attendant costs tend to preclude any detailed study in the early development stages. It appears that the use of CAE to carry out development with virtually no prototyping would enable detailed studies to be made more easily and at less cost to the company. In the present study, Taguchi methods were applied to the problem of vibration in a disk, with the object of analyzing the shape to solve the problem of the clustering of natural frequencies,which adversely affects the function of the part, and finding an optimum shape. An L36 orthogonal array was used, and a natural frequency analysis was performed by modal analysis. The result was an improvement of more than 4 db, and through the application of quality engineering to CAE to study the problem in the early development stage, development investment was reduced by several tens of millions of yen.