Human-powered vehicle capable of movement in the longitudinal and lateral directions

Human-powered vehicles, especially conventional wheelchairs, are essential tools for people with lower body disability. But their movement in a lateral direction is limited or impossible, which burdens users who want to change directions, especially in a narrow space. Thus, a human-powered vehicle that can move in a lateral direction is required. To move in any direction, many motor-driven omnidirectional vehicles have been proposed, but humans cannot manually power their mechanisms. To solve this problem, we are developing a human-powered vehicle, that is, driven by hands of the rider, that can move in both the longitudinal and lateral directions. This paper proposes such a vehicle, which has a mechanism to move in the lateral direction like people can do while walking. We designed it so that riders can operate its mechanism by analyzing the space reachable by the rider’s palms where they can effectively exert power. We constructed a prototype and conducted experiments to confirm that the vehicle moves as expected with relatively low effort. In the experiments, we confirmed the validity of vehicle operation by comparing the moving time of the vehicle with and without the lateral translation function for different travel distances and passage widths. Our results showed that the proposed vehicle moves more quickly or requires shorter moving distance in comparison with a conventional wheelchair because of the lateral movement function. In addition, we found that the threshold for utility of the function is whether the passage width is larger than the vehicle diagonal length

Analysis of Effect of Motion Path on Leg Muscle Load and Evaluation of Device to Support Leg Motion During Robot Operation by Reducing Muscle Load

Because the human arm and leg have a similar skeletal structure, it may be possible to use the leg to operate a robot by the master-slave method. However, operation by the leg with six degrees of freedom has two problems. First, people move their ankle with a curved motion despite intending to move it linearly. Second, it is a burden for the operator to suspend their legs in the air during operation. This study dealt with these problems. For the first problem, we hypothesized that one of the reasons was that the muscle load of a curved motion was smaller than that of a linear motion, and we quantitatively compared them by musculoskeletal analysis. The muscle loads of curved motions were 20% smaller in the anteroposterior direction, 3.1% to 23.8% smaller in the lateral direction, and 10% smaller in the vertical direction than linear motions, which showed that the hypothesis was consistent. Further, comparison of the analysis results with the results of a previous study suggested that subjects unconsciously tried to reduce the muscle load and to move closer to a linear line when they moved their ankle while consciously intending to make a linear motion. For the second problem, we developed two different prototypes of a leg support device. An experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of these devices showed that subjective exercise intensity of the tasks in the experiment using the devices was 40% or more less than that without the device, which proved the effectiveness of the devices

Face-centred cubic to body-centred cubic martensitic transformation of Fe-Co particles in a copper matrix

金沢大学大学院自然科学研究科機能創成システム金沢大学工学

Cancer Phenotype Diagnosis and Drug Efficacy within Japanese Health Care

An overview on targeted personalized medicine is given describing the developments in Japan of lung cancer patients. These new targeted therapies with novel personalized medicine drugs require new implementations, in order to follow and monitor drug efficacy and outcome. Examples from IRESSA (Gefitinib) and TARCEVA (Erlotinib) treatments used in medication of lung cancer patients are presented. Lung cancer is one of the most common causes of cancer mortality in the world. The importance of both the quantification of disease progression, where diagnostic-related biomarkers are being implemented, in addition to the actual measurement of disease-specific mechanisms relating to pathway signalling activation of disease-progressive protein targets is summarised. An outline is also presented, describing changes and adaptations in Japan, meeting the rising costs and challenges. Today, urgent implementation of programs to address these needs has led to a rebuilding of the entire approach of medical evaluation and clinical care

Development of a classifier to screen for severe sleep disorders in children

This study aimed to develop an automatic classifier for the identification of severe sleep disorders that require immediate intervention in children. Our study assessed 7,008 children (age: 0–83 months) in Japan, whose parents and nursery teachers recorded their 14-day sleep patterns. Sleep quality was assessed by pediatricians and scored as 1 (no severe sleep disorder) or 0 (severe sleep disorder). Discriminant analysis was performed for each age group using sleep quality (0 or 1) as the dependent variable and variables in the 14-day sleep log as independent variables. A stepwise method was used to select the independent variables to build the best model. The accuracy of the discriminant analysis for the age groups ranged from 71.3 to 97.3%. In summary, we developed an automatic classifier with sufficient application value to screen for severe sleep disorders in children. In the future, this classifier can be used to rapidly determine the presence or absence of severe sleep disorders in children based on their 14-day sleep logs, thus allowing immediate intervention