Proposal and Evaluation of Toilet Timing Suggestion Methods for the Elderly

Elderly people need to urinate frequently, and when they go on outings they often have a difficult time finding restrooms. Because of this, researching a body water management system is needed. Our proposed system calculates timing trips to the toilet in consideration with both their schedules and the amount of body water needing to be expelled, and recommends using the restroom with sufficient time before needing to urinate. In this paper, we describe the suggested methods of this system and show the experimental results for the toilet timing suggestion methods

Assessing the Use of Communication Robots for Recreational Activities at Nursing Homes

We are using information communication technology and communication robots (hereafter referred to as "robots") to develop a service to assist recreational activities at nursing homes. The service relies on visual content to deliver a variety of recreational activities, from exercises to reminiscence therapy. Robots support those activities by interacting with nursing home residents. These services are currently being evaluated at various elderly care facilities, where they have been installed. This report will review the recreational contents that are currently under development, the outline of the assessments, and present the latest data from those assessments

Proceedings of the 4th ACM International Workshop on Context-Awareness for Self-Managing Systems

Ubiquitous computing has become a realistic paradigm for the next generation of distributed systems due to the rapid progress in wireless networks and mobile computing technologies. In this paradigm, mobile devices have access to many sensors, which are distributed in the environment around the users; and rich information is collected from these sensors and used for recognizing user's context with high precision. However, there are still a number of challenges, for example, how to dynamically configure and reconfigure networks as well as the sensors according to different (and potentially conflicting) requirements; how to combine the data from heterogeneous sources, and so on. CASEMANS workshops provide the opportunity for the researchers of the ubiquitous and context-aware computing, and those of the autonomous computing (self-management) to exchange ideas on tackling these challenges. This year, CASEMANS 2010 received 18 papers from Asia, Europe and North America. All papers have been reviewed by at least three reviewers, based on their significance, novelty, technical quality and practical relevance. In the end, we selected 10 papers for presentation and publication to keep the acceptance rate at a reasonable level. These papers include systems of various kinds and represent aspects of both context-awareness and self-management

The Local CNP/GC-B system in growth plate is responsible for physiological endochondral bone growth.

Recent studies revealed C-type natriuretic peptide (CNP) and its receptor, guanylyl cyclase-B (GC-B) are potent stimulators of endochondral bone growth. As they exist ubiquitously in body, we investigated the physiological role of the local CNP/GC-B in the growth plate on bone growth using cartilage-specific knockout mice. Bones were severely shorter in cartilage-specific CNP or GC-B knockout mice and the extent was almost the same as that in respective systemic knockout mice. Cartilage-specific GC-B knockout mice were shorter than cartilage-specific CNP knockout mice. Hypertrophic chondrocyte layer of the growth plate was drastically reduced and proliferative chondrocyte layer, along with the proliferation of chondrocytes there, was moderately reduced in either cartilage-specific knockout mice. The survival rate of cartilage-specific CNP knockout mice was comparable to that of systemic CNP knockout mice. The local CNP/GC-B system in growth plate is responsible for physiological endochondral bone growth and might further affect mortality via unknown mechanisms

SCENARIO VIOLATION AS GAPS BETWEEN ACTIVITY PATTERNS

In this paper, we propose interactive and visual discovery method of hidden factors for accidents or incidents. Accidents or incidents tend to occur because of very small differences from an ideal situation. From the above viewpoint, we introduce scenario violation model and regard scenario violation as a gap from the proper scenario. Previously, we proposed abduction-based scenario violation determination strategy, but in this paper, we adopt the Kamishibai-KeyGraph to analyze multiple patterns at the same time. Then, we show a gap discovery procedure by using the Kamishibai-KeyGraph.Scenario violation, incident and accident, Kamishibai KeyGraph