KINEMATICS OF MEN STRIKING MOTION IN EIGHTH DAN KENDO PLAYERS

The purpose of this study was to explore the time series kinematic variations during the men striking motion in eighth dan kendo players. Moreover, the magnitude of the individual difference and timing at which it appeared were investigated. Ten eighth dan kendo players performed men striking towards one of two targets (men or kote) with maximum effort immediately after an LED lamp was lighted. The motions were recorded using a motion capture system. This study examined the time series kinematic variations during the men striking motion, and revealed that the movements of the shinai (sword), right and left shoulders, and right hip differed substantially among individuals from each standard deviation

Finding Nursing in the Room from Accelerometers and Audio on Mobile Sensors

In this paper, we propose a method for finding intervals of nursing activities from accelerometers and audio on mobile sensors which are attached to nurses in reality. If we can find the intervals of nursing activities correctly, it helps the data to be used for machine learning for activity recognition. We have extracted the times of nursing interactions between nurses and patients by A) recognize walking activity from accelerometers, B) recognize if s/he is in the patient’s room or not at each time duration divided by walking activities, from the environmental noise levels of sounds, and, C) for the du- ration where s/he is assumed to be in the patient’s room, apply voice activity detection by fundamental frequencies using Cepstrum method, and extract the duration in which a person speaks. As a result of the experience for 300sec of sensor data, we observed sufficient accuracy for each step of A)-C), and could reduce the time to 8%.Third International Workshop on Location Awareness for Mixed and Dual Reality (LAMDa’13), In Conjunction with the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI’13), March 19th, 2013, Santa Monica, California, US

Negative correlation of G+C content at silent substitution sites between orthologous human and mouse protein-coding sequences

金沢大学大学院医学系研究科病態検査学We conducted a genome-wide analysis of variations in guanine plus cytosine (G+C) content at the third codon position at silent substitution sites of orthologous human and mouse protein-coding nucleotide sequences. Alignments of 3776 human protein-coding DNA sequences with mouse orthologs having >50 synonymous codons were analyzed, and nucleotide substitutions were counted by comparing sequences in the alignments extracted from gap-free regions. The G+C content at silent sites in these pairs of genes showed a strong negative correlation (r = -0.93). Some gene pairs showed significant differences in G+C content at the third codon position at silent substitution sites. For example, human thymine-DNA glycosylase was A+T-rich at the silent substitution sites, while the orthologous mouse sequence was G+C-rich at the corresponding sites. In contrast, human matrix metalloproteinase 23B was G+C-rich at silent substitution sites, while the mouse ortholog was A+T-rich. We discuss possible implications of this significant negative correlation of G+C content at silent sites. © The Author 2006. Kazusa DNA Research Institute

Five-Year Technological Changes of Distant Medical Education in Asia

All physicians would benefit from more comprehensive distance learning. However, the technology is often difficult to use because technological infrastructure is limited in many hospitals in Asia. Since 2003, we have worked to advance international distant medical education implemented through the Internet in Asia. This paper presents an analysis of our activities over the past five years to evaluate the technical transition and its effects on modes of distant medical education. Methods: We analysed distant medical education programmes that we conducted from 2011 to 2015. We used a Digital Video Transport System (DVTS), H.323 and Vidyo, along with commercial and research and education networks (REN) installed in the subject hospitals. Questionnaires were randomly distributed to the audience to evaluate image resolution, image movement, sound quality, and programme content. Results: The number of programmes increased to over 90 per year in 2014–2015. The main system gradually changed from DVTS (58%, 30/52 in 2011) to Vidyo (64%, 67/104 in 2015). The number of new institutions increased to 149 in 2014–2015. Over 92% of the ratings for image resolution and movement were positive. Sound quality was somewhat lower at 83%. Ultimately, 98% of respondents rated the programmes “very good” or “good.” Conclusions: Continuous technical development was observed with increasing numbers of sites for each programme. This resulted in expansion of activity involving non-university hospitals. Practical distant medical education, satisfies physicians’ need for quality and inclusiveness could be expanded to normal hospitals in Asia and beyond

ACT2G: Attention-based Contrastive Learning for Text-to-Gesture Generation

Recent increase of remote-work, online meeting and tele-operation task makes people find that gesture for avatars and communication robots is more important than we have thought. It is one of the key factors to achieve smooth and natural communication between humans and AI systems and has been intensively researched. Current gesture generation methods are mostly based on deep neural network using text, audio and other information as the input, however, they generate gestures mainly based on audio, which is called a beat gesture. Although the ratio of the beat gesture is more than 70% of actual human gestures, content based gestures sometimes play an important role to make avatars more realistic and human-like. In this paper, we propose a attention-based contrastive learning for text-to-gesture (ACT2G), where generated gestures represent content of the text by estimating attention weight for each word from the input text. In the method, since text and gesture features calculated by the attention weight are mapped to the same latent space by contrastive learning, once text is given as input, the network outputs a feature vector which can be used to generate gestures related to the content. User study confirmed that the gestures generated by ACT2G were better than existing methods. In addition, it was demonstrated that wide variation of gestures were generated from the same text by changing attention weights by creators

Nursing Activity Sensing Using Mobile Sensors and Proximity Sensors

In recent years, big data are utilized in many industries.In this study, in order to analyze duties of thenurses, we performed experiments to collect the dutiesactivity data of the nurses for a long term. Weset 38 nurses as subjects and asked them to carry outduties while attaching a wearable small sensor device,and collected the acceleration data, meeting informationbetween nurses and the nurse duties information.In addition, we collected the location information of the nurses by using infrared information and communication equipment at the same time. From various data collected, we analyzed intensity and positional information of duties activity of the nurse, meeting information and the duties information between nurses and considered the influence that each factor affected to the nurse. As the result, we found that intensity of the activity increases in such nurses as who has many times of meeting with other nurses, visits the patient room many times, or who works on jobs concerning with the assistance of the patients such as rehabilitation assistance duties or the activity assistance dutiesThe 47th ISCIE International Symposium on Stochastic Systems Theory and Its Applications (SSS\u2715), December 5-8, 2015, Waikiki Beach Marriott Resort & Spa, Hawaii, US

Mechanisms of the inhibition of reverse transcription by unmodified and modified antisense oligonucleotides

AbstractWe demonstrated that unmodified and modified (phosphorothioate) oligonucleotides prevent cDNA synthesis by AMV or HIV reverse transcriptases. Antisense oligonucleotide/RNA hybrids specifically arrest primer extension. The blockage involves the degradation of the RNA fragment bound to the antisense oligonucleotide by the reverse transcriptase-associated RNase H activity. However, the phosphorothioate oligomer inhibited polymerization by binding to the AMV RT rather than to the template RNA, whereas there was no competitive binding of the phosphorothioate oligomer on the HIV RT during reverse transcription

SURFACE MARKERS AND GENE EXPRESSION TO CHARACTERIZE THE DIFFERENTIATION OF MONOLAYER EXPANDED HUMAN ARTICULAR CHONDROCYTES

Autologous chondrocyte implantation (ACI) is a method of cartilage repair. To improve the quality of regenerated tissue by ACI, it is essential to identify surface marker expression correlated with the differentiation status of monolayer expanded human articular chondrocytes and to define the index for discriminating dedifferentiated cells from monolayer expanded human articular chondrocytes. Normal human articular chondrocytes were cultured in monolayer until passage 4. At each passage, mRNA expression of collagen type I, II, and X and aggrecan was analyzed by real-time quantitative PCR, and the surface marker expression of CD14, CD26, CD44, CD49a, CD49c, CD54, and CD151 was analyzed by fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS). The ratios of mRNA levels of collagen type II to I (Col II/Col I) represented the differentiation status of chondrocytes more appropriately during monolayer culture. The surface marker expression of CD44, CD49c, and CD151 was upregulated according to the dedifferentiation status, whereas that of CD14, CD49a, and CD54 was downregulated. The most appropriate combination of the ratio of Col II/Col I was CD54 and CD44. Cell sorting was performed using a magnetic cell sorting system (MACS) according to CD54 and CD44, and real-time quantitative PCR was performed for the cell subpopulations before and after cell sorting. The expression of collagen type II and aggrecan of the chondrocytes after MACS was higher than that before sorting, but not significantly. The mean fluorescence intensity (MFI) ratio of CD54 to CD44 could be an adequate candidate as the index of the differentiation status