Delivery of pleasant stroke touch via robot in older adults.

Touch care has clinically positive effects on older adults. Touch can be delivered using robots, addressing the lack of caregivers. A recent study of younger participants showed that stroke touch delivered via robot produced subjective and physiologically positive emotional responses similar to those evoked by human touch.

Pleasant Stroke Touch on Human Back by a Human and a Robot.

Pleasant touching is an important aspect of social interactions that is widely used as a caregiving technique. To address the problems resulting from a lack of available human caregivers, previous research has attempted to develop robots that can perform this kind of pleasant touch. However, it remains unclear whether robots can provide such a pleasant touch in a manner similar to humans.

Analysis of Skin Deformation Differences on the Upper Arm Between Active and Passive Movements During Elbow Flexion and Extension.

The motion ability of patients in the acute phase of stroke is difficult to define with existing indexes such as the Brunnstrom stage. Hence, for designing a novel evaluation index for stroke rehabilitation in the acute phase, we focused on the differences between the skin deformations in active and passive movements. Skin deformation reflects the activities of body tissues that are related to motion ability.

A Quantitative Measurement of Hand Scaling Motion for Dental Hygienist Training.

In dental hygienist education, many skills are taught that cannot be acquired without repeated training. To make this training more efficient, we need to measure the students' skills and show correction points in real-time. In this research, we focus on hand scaling work, which is one of the most important tasks of dental hygienists.

Prediction of Plantar Forces During Gait Using Wearable Sensors and Deep Neural Networks.

To enable on-time and high-fidelity lower-limb exoskeleton control, it is effective to predict the future human motion from the observed status. In this research, we propose a novel method to predict future plantar force during the gait using IMU and plantar sensors. Deep neural networks (DNN) are used to learn the non-linear relationship between the measured sensor data and the future plantar force data.

Estimation of the Operating Force From the Human Motion.

In this research, we propose a new method to estimate the operating force exerted when moving an object with the hands by observing the human motion only. The required force for moving the object can be estimated without equipping any sensors on the object or on the human body. From the measured joint angles, we calculate the center of mass and the hand's position using a human model.

Hand motion recognition based on forearm deformation measured with a distance sensor array.

Studies of upper limb motion analysis using surface electromyogram (sEMG) signals measured from the forearm plays an important role in various applications, such as human interfaces for controlling robotic exoskeletons, prosthetic hands, and evaluation of body functions. Though the sEMG signals have a lot of information about the activities of the muscles, the signals do not have the activities of the deep layer muscles. We focused on forearm deformation, since hand motion brings the muscles, tendons, and skeletons under the skin.

Rehand: Realistic electric prosthetic hand created with a 3D printer.

Myoelectric prosthetic hands provide an appearance with five fingers and a grasping function to forearm amputees. However, they have problems in weight, appearance, and cost. This paper reports on the Rehand, a realistic electric prosthetic hand created with a 3D printer.

Individual muscle control using an exoskeleton robot for muscle function testing.

Healthy individuals modulate muscle activation patterns according to their intended movement and external environment. Persons with neurological disorders (e.g.

Effects of S-adenosylmethionine decarboxylase, polyamines, amino acids, and weak bases (amines and ammonia) on development and ribosomal RNA synthesis in Xenopus embryos.

We have been studying control mechanisms of gene expression in early embryogenesis in a South African clawed toad Xenopus laevis, especially during the period of midblastula transition (MBT), or the transition from the phase of active cell division (cleavage stage) to the phase of extensive morphogenesis (post-blastular stages). We first found that ribosomal RNA synthesis is initiated shortly after MBT in Xenopus embryos and those weak bases, such as amines and ammonium ion, selectively inhibit the initiation and subsequent activation of rRNA synthesis. We then found that rapidly labeled heterogeneous mRNA-like RNA is synthesized in embryos at pre-MBT stage.

Biomechanical analysis of subjective pinching effort based on tendon-skeletal model.

In this paper, the influence of the finger posture on the subjective effort during pinching motion is investigated by using a tendon-skeletal finger model. The experimental results show that the subjective effort human feels is affected by the size of the object he/she pinches, and the subjective effort correlates with the finger length. The simulation results show that the pattern of the tendon forces is similar to that of the EMG activity measured in the experiment, and the positive correlation was observed between the finger length and the object size where the summation of the tendon forces becomes the minimum.

Estimation of physical constraint condition by analyzing walking motions.

In this paper, the estimation system of physical constraint conditions is proposed using motion data during walks. Walking motions of subjects who are fixed braces on their bodies were measured by a motion capturing system. We focused on the acceleration data on the body and found which parts in the body are influenced by the physical constraint.