The ability to walk is particularly important to maintain a person's quality of life (QOL). In today's aged society, ways to support the impaired gait of elderly people with a decline in physical function is in great demand. This paper proposes wearable projector-based gait assistance as a novel application of mobile projectors. The technical challenge is to compensate the projected image with the intended position and size during walking. To verify the concept, we developed a self-gait training assistance system that displays stride length information on the floor while the user is walking. We conducted a study with ten healthy older adults (ages: 76-91). The results show the effectiveness of visual clues in controlling stride length and elderly people's acceptance of the wearable projector device.

Our study aims to determine how an agent should be designed to perform cooperative work smoothly. From previous experiments, it has been suggested that a human does not acknowledge an agent as a real participant. We considered how we could confirm the above possibility with a cognitive experiment. We designed an experiment with a game format to determine whether subjects would acknowledge an agent's action and existence if the experimental situation presents mutual purpose and timing of entities. The results of our experiment clearly show that work efficiency improves by the agent's behavior. The results of these experiments will influence the model of Human-Agent Interaction in the future.

This paper describes a new algorithm and some applications of an outline procedure for LSI mask patterns. The outline procedure, which extracts the outline of designed primitive shapes, is required in pattern data preparation for electron-beam (e-beam) writing. A novel algorithm is developed to extract the outlines of patterns from a large number of designed shapes within a whole chip area. The algorithm is able to extract the outline with no limit to the number of vertices in a reasonable time. A program in which the algorithm is implemented is able to compensate for some process biases and leads to a successful 1-Mbit DRAM e-beam fabrication. Some other related applications, such as proximity effect correction, are also presented.