Presents a reprint from the IEEE Global History Network's STARS articles.

It is increasingly important to recognize daily activity pattern in order to detect early sign of dementia in the aging society. This paper shows indoor-outdoor activity recognition using only a smartphone. We developed an indoor living activity recognition engine and an outdoor migration activity recognition engine, and combined them into an Android™ application. The former recognizes not only "resting" or "walking" but also user's various living activities such as "vacuuming" and "brushing teeth" by using a built-in accelerometer and a built-in microphone. The latter engine recognizes the user's means of migration, namely, "resting," "walking," "running," and "boarding" by using a built-in accelerometer. It enables users to continuously recognize indoor-outdoor activities by switching between the two engines depending on an acquisition condition of GPS.

It is increasingly important to recognize daily activity pattern in order to detect early sign of dementia in the aging society. This paper shows indoor-outdoor activity recognition using only a smartphone. We developed an indoor living activity recognition engine and an outdoor migration activity recognition engine, and combined them into an Android™ application. The former recognizes not only "resting" or "walking" but also user's various living activities such as "vacuuming" and "brushing teeth" by using a built-in accelerometer and a built-in microphone. The latter engine recognizes the user's means of migration, namely, "resting," "walking," "running," and "boarding" by using a built-in accelerometer. It enables users to continuously recognize indoor-outdoor activities by switching between the two engines depending on an acquisition condition of GPS satellites.

In this paper, we review the dramatic impact that technology has had on society and past predictions about future technology, and predict the impact of future technology. The methods with which technology affects society can be categorized into what we will call lifestyle “waves” of change. We will describe three specific types of waves and how they affect specific types of personal and home electronics. The lifestyle waves we will consider are: 1) time and place independence; 2) interactivity; and 3) integration of the physical and information worlds. We will consider how these waves influence three categories of personal and home electronics: 1) home appliances (i.e., washing machines, dishwashers, etc.); 2) audio/video products (i.e., TVs, stereos, etc.); and 3) personal electronic gadgets (i.e., mobile phones, navigational devices, etc.). These waves typically are introduced into one category of electronics and rapidly cross pollinate to all categories. We will also discuss how specific trends in technology, such as hardware, software, user interfaces, and content distribution, can generate these lifestyle waves of change. Finally, we make some predictions on how these waves and trends in technology may impact personal and home electronics in the future.

The EU, South Korea and Japan have a pressing need to compensate for growing labor shortages in their aging societies. There is growing awareness that robotic technology has the potential to ameliorate this problem in terms of both physical and mental labor. To take an example of mental labor, a human therapist dealing with elderly people must be an active listener. In order to realize a robot capable of active listening, we adopt Ivey's basic listening sequence skills in microcounseling. In this paper, we describe a voice interface robot that realizes simple feedback, repeat feedback and questions for Ivey's basic listening sequence. We conducted an experiment, whose results show that 69% of incidences of feedback have adequate reflective words for spoken sentences and 56% of questions are adequate for these reflective words.

A document layout system based on automatic extraction of document architecture including logical and reference structures has been developed for reducing users' effort in document preparation, and has been implemented in a practical Japanese word processor. The extracted document architecture is used for both automatic text formatting and layout of text, figures and tables. Automatic text element recognition is performed by morphological analysis using keywords. Through intra-line (one sentence) and inter-line (relations between sentences) analysis, logical and reference structures are obtained. The automatic layout system effectively lays out the document using the extracted document architecture and knowledge about the layout.