Remote and home care, 24/7 monitoring, and other new procedures are modernizing the processes of professional care as well as enabling better self-monitoring capabilities for health and wellbeing enthusiastic. Due to the aging, societies all around the world are coming to lack of decent healthcare services. Thus, any relief in nursing work is preferred. Wireless technology will be an enabler to accelerate this paradigm change. Monitoring person's own vital signs is not tight to a specific location but data collection can be done real-time wherever and whenever. Also, numerous sensors can be used to collect appropriate vital data. Automated data collection enables continuous monitoring of health status or progress of certain symptom, but enables also efficient data post-processing and access to health data ubiquitously. European Telecommunications Standards Institute's (ETSI) SmartBAN is the newest wireless technology dedicated to body area networks to transfer vital information in reliable manner and with low power consumption. Not only used for outpatient, the SmartBAN is also available for use in different hospital, nursing home, training, etc. procedures.

Measuring the living condition and health status of users using small sensing devices and collecting the data of each user over wireless networks is expected to be a new trend in healthcare. Body Area Network (BAN) is an emerging area of personal data communications that will facilitate the capture of data and its collection. Although the IEEE 802.15.6 standard for wireless body area networks was created for this purpose, it is very complex and is unsuitable for ultra low power sensors. A new BAN specification, under the Technical Committee (TC) on SmartBAN, is now being considered in the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) targeting ultra low power devices. Some of the technical requirements of the new Smart BAN system includes ultra-low power consumption, coexistence with other wireless systems, a timely access mechanism and optimum control of quality of service (QoS) for emergency signals. A simple and energy efficient MAC/PHY system has been proposed by the authors as part of the ETSI TC Smart BAN specifications. In this paper, we introduce and evaluate our proposed Smart BAN system which is based on two channels, a control channel and a data channel. The control channel is used for announcements from which both nodes and neighboring hubs are able to gather information for use in co-existence algorithms as well as for initial connection setup. Our proposed system uses simple time division multiple access (TDMA) in the data channel so that the power consumption of nodes is kept low. A shared access mechanism has also been proposed to reduce the latency of emergency signals. We evaluate the access delay and power consumption of our system in this paper, and show that the proposed shared access mechanism reduces the latency of emergency signals.

It is widely acknowledged that the actuator's intrinsic backdrivability is important in realizing a force sensitive behavior. It is desirable to realize such actuator with electric motor that is advantageous from power-to-weight ratio and controllability point of view. Electro-Hydrostatic Actuator is a type of hydraulic actuators that can realize high backdrivability by reducing transmission friction and by providing dynamics decoupling with an implicit serial damper. To farther enhance the backdrivability of a EHA, a pump with minimum static and Coulomb friction is necessary. In this paper, we introduce an EHA with viscous screw pump that minimizes static and Coulomb friction by eliminating the mechanical contact between pump components. Viscous screw pumps also have the advantage that there is no pulsation in pressure due to the continuity of the force transmission from the rotor to the fluid. The property of the actuator, including pulsation performance and impedance control performance were evaluated on a prototype of EHA with a viscous screw pump.

When subjects adapt their reaching movements in the setting of a systematic force or visual perturbation, generalization of adaptation can be assessed psychophysically in two ways: by testing untrained locations in the work space at the end of adaptation (slow postadaptation generalization) or by determining the influence of an error on the next trial during adaptation (fast trial-by-trial generalization). These two measures of generalization have been widely used in psychophysical studies, but the reason that they might differ has not been addressed explicitly. Our goal was to develop a computational framework for determining when a two-state model is justified by the data and to explore the implications of these two types of generalization for neural representations of movements. We first investigated, for single-target learning, how well standard statistical model selection procedures can discriminate two-process models from single-process models when learning and retention coefficients were systematically varied. We then built a two-state model for multitarget learning and showed that if an adaptation process is indeed two-rate, then the postadaptation generalization approach primarily probes the slow process, whereas the trial-by-trial generalization approach is most informative about the fast process. The fast process, due to its strong sensitivity to trial error, contributes predominantly to trial-by-trial generalization, whereas the strong retention of the slow system contributes predominantly to postadaptation generalization. Thus, when adaptation can be shown to be two-rate, the two measures of generalization may probe different brain representations of movement direction.

Recently, environment monitoring system attracts attention because global and/or local disasters such as global warming problem, air pollution, heavy rain and flood etc. occur everywhere. In addition, some people and companies have a weather sensor and broad band internet service become widespread as weather sensor and internet service cost lower. Many of these existing sensor network are operated by Server-Client model. However, it is difficult to manage a number of distributed sensors, and this model is weak for fault tolerance. We adopt P2P model in order to correct the necessary information effectively. On the other hand, the number of weather sensors cannot be satisfied enough to cover an arbitrary point on the earth though the users of such a weather sensor network are keen to know the information around them. In this paper, we present the method of spatial interpolation of the weather sensor data on P2P network based on location information.

We developed a practical field-based method of sensing the physiological status of live plants. The potential of detecting solar-induced plant fluorescence, which originates in chlorophyll molecules, through a non-destructive and remote sensing method was investigated. We constructed a plant fluorescence imaging system that adopted the Fraunhofer line discrimination (FLD) method in which the A-line (atmospheric oxygen absorption band of 760.78 nm) was used. The performance of the system was tested using three types of sampled leaves. Fluorescence intensities from their images produced with the system were highly correlated with fluorescence obtained from fluorospectrometer measurements (R2=3D0.95). We were able to produce fluorescence imaging of a redrobin living in field, including leaves, stems and branches. Fluorescence intensity varied with the chlorophyll content of each component.

In this paper, a novel design and implementation of a geographical observation system based on P2P agents is described. We propose sensor agent architecture to realize efficient and real-time notifications of sensor information. In this architecture, sensors act as agents and send updated notification messages to the observer agents which satisfy specified conditions by making use of multiple overlays. These features are implemented on P2P agent software 'PIAX'. In this implementation, Web browsers and cellular phones can act as observer agents.

An inductive quartz crystal oscillator circuit with a CMOS inverter was investigated. The quartz resonance frequency was 32 kHz. The inductive circuit consisted of the negative capacitance circuit to create an equivalent inductance. The equivalent inductance is given without using any inductors. This circuit can be made to oscillate inductively and has a wide variable frequency range (327.7 ppm).

Gas sensors coated with mixed lipid film, mist sensors coated with lipid film, and angular sensors with an AT-cut quartz crystal oscillator were investigated. Mixed lipid film on the quartz crystal increased the sensitivity of the quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) gas sensors for Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs). The approximate curves were created from the frequency shift curves of the gas sensors. The differential coefficients of the approximate curves at 25 and 50 sec showed better classification of the VOCs. The mist sensors coated with lipid film had a different sensitivity to the volatile mists, where the fine mist of the volatile liquid was produced by an ultrasonic vibration of the atomizer. The angular sensor can detect a rotation angle by gravity sensitivity, where a hydroxyapatite thin layer has been deposited on an electrode of the oscillator in order to increase the gravity sensitivity. The frequency deviation caused by the rotation of oscillator shifted between -0.4 and 0.8 ppm.

We investigated the differences between two well-known optimization principles for understanding movement planning: the minimum variance (MV) model of Harris and Wolpert (1998) and the minimum torque change (MTC) model of Uno, Kawato, and Suzuki (1989). Both models accurately describe the properties of human reaching movements in ordinary situations (e.g., nearly straight paths and bell-shaped velocity profiles). However, we found that the two models can make very different predictions when external forces are applied or when the movement duration is increased. We considered a second-order linear system for the motor plant that has been used previously to simulate eye movements and single-joint arm movements and were able to derive analytical solutions based on the MV and MTC assumptions. With the linear plant, the MTC model predicts that the movement velocity profile should always be symmetrical, independent of the external forces and movement duration. In contrast, the MV model strongly depends on the movement duration and the system's degree of stability; the latter in turn depends on the total forces. The MV model thus predicts a skewed velocity profile under many circumstances. For example, it predicts that the peak location should be skewed toward the end of the movement when the movement duration is increased in the absence of any elastic force. It also predicts that with appropriate viscous and elastic forces applied to increase system stability, the velocity profile should be skewed toward the beginning of the movement. The velocity profiles predicted by the MV model can even show oscillations when the plant becomes highly oscillatory. Our analytical and simulation results suggest specific experiments for testing the validity of the two models.