Dysphagia is a medical term for difficulty of swallowing. For these patients, silent aspiration or aspiration without coughing lead to aspiration pneumonia. Generally, Video Fluoroscopic (VF) swallow-testing is performed to evaluate swallowing movement. The purpose of VF is the detailed evaluation and diagnosis of dysphagia. Based on them, the examiner estimates how to approach for dysphagia, and provides appropriately adjusted food consistency. However, this testing has some serious problems that include X-ray exposure and lack of mobility, and so on. Therefore, this study proposes a nonrestrictive and noninvasive swallow-monitoring system using acoustic analysis. This system works on observation of swallowing and breathing, and detects swallowing based on acoustic frequency factors and respiratory flow. As a result, this study developed an algorism for swallowing detection with high specificity. Moreover, it is discussed and concluded on the findings associated with the frequency properties of swallowing and non-swallowing behaviors.

The authors have developed a wide color gamut and high brightness WUXGA LCD monitor with a color calibrator. This monitor has the world's highest performance for color gamut and brightness for monitors whose number of pixels is equal to or greater than UXGA. This monitor provides the performance necessary for fields requiring advanced color control, such as DTP, prepress, printing and moving images. This paper describes the background to its development, the technical problems and the results of evaluation. We also touch upon the world's first six-primary-color liquid crystal display using six-color LEDs having a 170% or wider color gamut than conventional displays as our second step of development.

To realize practical orbital servicing missions in the 21/sup st/ century, we have developed a new system concept for an orbital servicing vehicle named Hyper-OSV (Orbital Servicing Vehicle), which has higher speed manipulation capability and larger operation area than OSVs that were proposed in the 1990's. The main feature of Hyper-OSV (HOSV) is the separation of the operation function and the long-term in-orbit surviving functions such as a solar panel and a large communication antenna. This releases HOSV from attitude restrictions and flexible dynamics and provides a large operation area. The second feature of HOSV is the reconfigurable function that allows HOSV to perform various orbital servicing missions. One of the most difficult missions of HOSV is the noncooperative satellite capture. Separation of the operation function and the long-term in-orbit survival functions gives HOSV an agile working ability. Thus, we have proposed a satellite capturing strategy using an agile orbital servicing vehicle like HOSV and have been conducting its feasibility study. This paper outlines Hyper-OSV first, and then presents the satellite capturing strategy using an agile orbital servicing vehicle and feasibility studies of the satellite capturing.

Problems of modeling and controlling the 3D motion of a flexible space robot is discussed. By concentrating the mass at the joint and neglecting the link mass, the model of the flexible robot is derived based on Lagrange dynamics and rigid and flexible coordinates transformation. For further frequency analysis, the obtained linear model is modified so that state variables of the model are independent. The model has been verified by simulation results and experiments using the laboratory robot. The resultant model is simple and easy to be executed efficiently in the real-time control. Control problems are then discussed based on the derived model. A control scheme for adaptation to variations of dynamics due to configuration changes is presented and has been implemented in a space flexible robot.>