Digital flavour modulation represents a significant research challenge within Human-Food Interaction. Previous work has focused on modulating basic tastes, while the modulation of trigeminal sensations such as spiciness and coolness remains underexplored. Spicy and cool substances contribute substantially to the sensory appeal of food and beverages; however, their overconsumption can have adverse health effects. To enhance these trigeminal flavours without chemical additives, this study proposes an integrated multimodal approach combining electrical tongue stimulation with congruent olfactory stimuli. Unlike unimodal methods, our approach leverages the interaction between direct neural stimulation and olfactory integration to selectively modulate distinct spiciness and coolness perception. Psychophysical experiments demonstrated that our method significantly enhanced perceived coolness through combination of electrical tongue stimulation and lemon odor, and significantly enhanced perceived spiciness of a spicy solution by electrical tongue stimulation. These findings suggest that our method expands design space for digital flavour modulation and contributes to healthier and more enriched eating and drinking experiences.

There has been a lot of attention to digital microfluidic biochips (DMFBs) in biochemical and medical industries. A major error source in operations on a DMFB is due to an unbalanced splitting error at a mixing operation. There has been a lot of existing research to tackle this problem; essentially two strategies have been studied so far. One strategy is a retry-based roll-back strategy; if an unacceptable error is detected, we roll back to a checkpoint to redo some part of the experiment again. The other strategy is to duplicate some concentration values, and mix droplets with the same concentration values to mitigate the impact of unbalanced splitting errors. Obviously, both techniques increase the number of mixing operations. This paper proposes a totally new technique compared to the above-mentioned existing two strategies. More precisely, our proposed method only selects the destinations of the output droplets from an intermediate node that has more than two outputs to be used later; our method does not need any additional overhead unlike the existing strategies. Although such a selection has not been studied in the community, this paper reveals that we can mitigate the impact of unbalanced splitting errors by an appropriate selection. To find the best selection, we introduce a measure called RRE (Ratio of Residual Error) which can tell how much each error affects the final target concentration very efficiently. We also show some simulation results by which we can confirm that our method can indeed reduce the impact of unbalanced splitting errors without any overhead.

A growing number of nonlinear EEG studies have elucidated the reduced fractality in Alzheimer's disease (AD). However, despite the importance of studying EEG dynamics within physiologically relevant frequency ranges, far fewer studies have explored temporal-dependent fractal properties in AD. This study was aimed at assessing the temporal-scale specific fractal properties in AD using Higuchi's fractal algorithm. As a result, we found both enhanced and reduced fractality in a temporal-scale relevant manner. Our findings suggest that investigating temporal specific fractal properties in EEG might serve as a useful approach for characterizing neural basis of AD.

In this paper, our research objective is to develop a database virtualization technique so that data analysts or other users who apply data mining methods to their jobs can use all ubiquitous databases in the Internet as if they were recognized as a single database, thereby helping to reduce their workloads such as data collection from the Internet databases and data cleansing works. In this study, firstly we examine XML scheme advantages and propose a database virtualization method by which such ubiquitous databases as relational databases, object-oriented databases, and XML databases are usable, as if they all behaved as a single database. Next, we show the method of virtualization of ubiquitous databases can describe ubiquitous database schema in a unified fashion using the XML schema. Moreover, it consists of a high-level concept of distributed database management of the same type and of different types, and also of a location transparency feature. Finally, we propose a database incompatibility trouble-recovery technique for use in a virtualized ubiquitous database use environment.

This paper proposes a novel type of edge-preserving smoothing filters to he applied to the images corrupted with impulsive and white Gaussian noise. This filter is based on the weighted mean filter whose coefficients can be varied adaptively by some kinds of local features in the window. The fuzzy control laws can be used for the implementation of the proposed filter and the optimization technique for the parameters of the membership functions and the fuzzy rules are described. Finally, the simulation example is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique.