In researching and developing materials, chemical companies make little use of robust quality engineering. Management, which wants to improve the efficiency of research and development, is dissatisfied that robust quality engineering is not being used as much as hoped. The present study on the dissemination of robust quality engineering was carried out to dispel this dissatisfaction and broaden the use of robust quality engineering methodologies among engineers. To find out why chemical engineers and research personnel do not use robust quality engineering, the situation at a particular company was analyzed. The analysis indicated limited involvement in screening at the early stages of research and development, but showed that the minority who do use robust quality engineering methodologies repeatedly have a high success rate, and that goal setting is a key factor. Engineers' behavior patterns were characterized by a lack of concern with speed, achievement, and underlying mechanisms. From a management viewpoint, increased involvement in goal setting, organization for early participation, and implantation of a self-motivated spirit of achievement are proposed as effective ways to encourage engineers and researchers to use robust quality engineering.

Authorship discrimination was studied by applying the Recognition Taguchi (RT)method to the works of four prominent Japanese writers. The RT method was proposed on the assumption that it would be applied to data of identical dimensions, such as pixel data or time-series data, so other types of data must be normalized. Two new normalization methods, one using the median and range and the other using the median and standard deviation, were proposed and compared with normalization by the standard deviation alone, which had been proposed previously. With any of the three normalization methods RT analysis successfully identified the four writers, but normalization by median and range was shown to be the best of the three methods. The conclusions reached were that the RT method can be used for authorship discrimination, and that when the RT method is applied to data of different dimensions(differrent units or characteristics), its discriminative capabilities can be improved by applying one of the newly proposed normalization methods.

Promoting the education of quality engineering at the university, the teaching method for the S/N ratio using a familiar material easy to understand for students has been proposed. The material is a card made of several sheets of paper with different surface condition and appearance, and is scoring depending on the smoothness of the surface with the fingertips. A lecture of quality engineering using the proposed material for the students of the faculty of engineering was conducted, and its effect was examined qualitatively. In order to give the students to understand how to express the S/N ratio by measuring the variation,we made the students to be compared with the S/N ratio of other students. As the results of the experiments using the materials proposed, it was cleared that S/N ratio calculated in these experiments was included not only the variation of the senses but also variations of the method for quantifying the sense. Increasing the level of work proficiency by repeating the scoring tasks, the variation of the S/N ratio was reduced. In addition, the effect of education using this materials was examined qualitatively from the results of the questionnaire conducted after the lecture. As a result, many students made remarks that they were able to understand the importance of quality engineering. Experiments by scoring the smoothness of the paper led to the improvement of the motivation for the study of quality engineering.

Doppler ultrasound diagnoses are carried out mainly in cardiovascular clinics,where they have become routine tests. The diagnostic procedure is complex and takes time, imposing considerable burdens on both patient and technician. To solve this problem, methods of automating ultrasonic Doppler blood flow measurements have been under development for quite some time. The present study considers the possibility of an automated diagnostic support technology using the Mahalanobis-Taguchi system, based on automated Doppler measurement. An analysis using automatically traced Doppler waveforms and measured diagnostic indicators (values) related to the left ventricle distinguished between healthy and diseased subjects with sufficient accuracy. An analysis using only the measured diagnostic indicators to determine the presence of heart conditions had difficulty in distinguishing between healthy and diseased subjects, but favorable results were obtained from analyses targeted at some specific diseases (DCM, MS, MR). Further study will be carried out to improve the performance of the automatic diagnostic support technology by combining the diagnostic indicators found to be effective with automatically traced Doppler waveforms.