This study developed a fall detection system for elderly people in a nursing home and investigated their acceptance of it. The system obtained their positions and heights from range sensors and used that information to correctly detect 89.5% of the falls based on data where the elderly crouched in a mockup room of a nursing home. We investigated the social acceptance with elderly people by comparing three conditions: (1) only detecting out-of-bed, (2) detecting falls in a room and always showing the human position, and (3) detecting falls in a room and only showing the human position when a fall happened. The results showed that intention to use were significantly higher in the second and third conditions than the first condition.

The importance of assistive robots for elderly people is increasing to match the needs of rapidly aging world societies. This paper develops a wheelchair robot to support the movement of the elderly to decrease caregiver workloads from the perspective of physical load and time consumption. We observed the behaviors of caregivers at a private residential care home when they are wheeling elderly people in wheelchairs. The behavior includes appropriate utterances for reducing the anxieties of senior citizens based on properties of place, e.g., "Here the path is a little narrow" while passing a narrow space or "Now let's go into elevator." They also adjusted to the wheeling speed preference of each individual because their preferred speeds were different. We implemented these two functions for elderly care using the Ubiquitous Network Robot Platform that allows the management of users and environment properties. Experimental results with elderly participants at a pseudo resident home show that the seniors prefer a wheelchair robot on which the above functions have been implemented.

In this paper, we discuss how networked robot architectures can facilitate the development, deployment, management and adaptation of distributed robotic applications. Our aim is to modularize applications by factoring out environment, task-, domain-, and robot-specific knowledge components and representing them explicitly in a formal knowledge base that is shared between the robots and service applications. Robot control decisions can then be formulated in terms of inference tasks that are evaluated based on this knowledge during task execution. The explicit and modular knowledge representation allows human operators with different areas of expertise to adapt the respective parts of the knowledge independently. We implemented this concept by integrating knowledge representation methods of the RoboEarth project with the distributed task execution capabilities of the Ubiquitous Network Robot Platform.

This article proposes a new concept for a context-aware Web search method that automatically retrieves a webpage related to the daily activity that a user currently is engaged in and displays the page on nearby Internet-connected home appliances such as televisions. For example, when a user is washing a coffeemaker, a webpage is retrieved that includes tips such as “cleaning a coffee maker with vinegar removes stains well,” and the page is displayed on a nearby appliance. In this article, we design and implement a Web search method that employs ubiquitous sensors to monitor a user's daily life. Our proposed method automatically searches for a webpage related to a daily activity by using a query constructed from the use of daily objects employed in the activity that is detected with object-attached sensors. We evaluate the search method with real datasets collected from vast numbers of sensors and achieve very accurate webpage retrieval. We then investigate the usefulness and effectiveness of a daily life Web search with Wizard-of-Oz (WOz)-like experiments. We confirm that the presentation of webpages related to daily activities improves participants' future daily lives and triggers communication among the participants in the experiment.

This paper proposes a method that estimates customer interests by identifying a set of areas at which a customer has stopped in our experimental shop environment and recommends items through robots located on the shop's shelves. We experimentally verified that our method changed customer behaviors. The results show that the method successfully encouraged customers to visit the shelves of recommended items.

The new concept proposed in this paper is a query free web search that automatically retrieves a web page including information related to the daily activity that we are currently engaged in for automatically displaying the page on Internet-connected domestic appliances around us such as televisions. When we are washing a coffee maker, for example, a web page is retrieved that includes tips such as `cleaning a coffee maker with vinegar removes stains well.' A method designed on the basis of this concept automatically searches for a web page by using a query constructed from the use of ordinary household objects that is detected by sensors attached to the objects. An in-situ experiment tests a variety of IR techniques and the experiment confirmed that our daily activities can produce related web pages with high accuracy.

This paper proposes new concept of query free web search for daily living. We ordinarily benefit from additional information about our daily activities that we are currently engaged in. When washing a coffee maker, for example, we receive the benefit if we obtain such information as 'cleaning a coffee maker with vinegar removes its stain well.' Our proposed method automatically searches for a web page including such information relates to an activity of daily living when the activity is performed. We assume that wireless sensor nodes are attached to daily objects to detect object use; our method makes a query from the names of objects which are used. Then, the method retrieves a web page relates to the activity of daily living by using the query.

In this paper, we present and discuss Community Organizer, a system designed to support network communities. The main characteristic of Community Organizer is the use of spatial representations for the relationships among community members including the communications exchanged among these members. These spatial representations reflect the degree of closeness of interests and concerns among the members, and are intended to provide users with clues on how to form network communities. In order to investigate the effectiveness of the proposed spatial representations, we conducted experiments with two different versions of the software. One version offered meaningful spatial representations while the other version did not. The subjects who used the former software version felt a greater sense of ‘community’, enjoyed using the software more, and actively used it longer than the subjects using the latter software version (control condition). These results indicated that the proposed spatial representations are effective in supporting network community formation.

Article An efficient approximate algorithm for winner determination in combinatorial auctions Share on Authors: Yuko Sakurai NTT Communication Science Laboratories, 2-4 Hikaridai, Seika-cho, Soraku-gun, Kyoto 619-0237 Japan NTT Communication Science Laboratories, 2-4 Hikaridai, Seika-cho, Soraku-gun, Kyoto 619-0237 JapanView Profile , Makoto Yokoo NTT Communication Science Laboratories, 2-4 Hikaridai, Seika-cho, Soraku-gun, Kyoto 619-0237 Japan NTT Communication Science Laboratories, 2-4 Hikaridai, Seika-cho, Soraku-gun, Kyoto 619-0237 JapanView Profile , Koji Kamei NTT Communication Science Laboratories, 2-4 Hikaridai, Seika-cho, Soraku-gun, Kyoto 619-0237 Japan NTT Communication Science Laboratories, 2-4 Hikaridai, Seika-cho, Soraku-gun, Kyoto 619-0237 JapanView Profile Authors Info & Claims EC '00: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM conference on Electronic commerceOctober 2000 Pages 30–37https://doi.org/10.1145/352871.352875Published:17 October 2000 38citation453DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations38Total Downloads453Last 12 Months5Last 6 weeks0 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access