It is said that walking is good for maintaining health. The target number of steps for elderly people is recommended to be 6,700 steps/day for men and 5,900 steps/day for women. In this study, one male subject was selected and the daily number of steps, body weight, total consumption, maximum and minimum blood pressure, temperature, etc. was recorded for 8 years, and it was examined whether or not continuing to take more than the recommended number of steps would contribute to maintaining health. The experimental results were summarized and the experience (feeling) was also reported. As a result, the subject maintained about 1.5 times the target number of steps for 8 years and spent his life without serious illness. The characteristics of the average number of steps in each month of each year tended to be low in winter and to increase from March to November when there was no snow covering the ground. A strong correlation (r = 0.82) was observed between mean weight and mean systolic blood pressure over the final 5 years (2018-2022). In addition, it can be said that there is a correlation between average temperature and heart rate (r = 0.71). Near the end of the experiment, the subject felt that walking more than 10,000 steps (for 5 days or more) caused fatigue in the legs due to aging. It is necessary to maintain an appropriate number of steps and gradually reduce the number without overdoing the exercise, and to consider the effects on the body, such as the knees. This research is also useful for deriving the tourism activity ability of the elderly.

The rates of the total number of foreign visitors from each country/region and the rates of the total number of guests in the Hokuriku region (including three prefectures: Fukui, Ishikawa, and Toyama) before the spread of corona infection (2019) are compared. The total number of foreign guests in the region were about 1.2 million in that year and the number of Ishikawa had the highest rate 64.3 % and Toyama was 27.5 %. The one for Fukui was 8.2 %. The number of guests from Taiwan were the largest in all prefectures and the total guest number from China was lower than the one for Taiwan. Chinese visitors account for 30 % of total number of foreign visitors to Japan and the number is maximum. In Fukui Prefecture, the personal travel expenditure for Chinese visitors is the largest of main countries/regions and it is necessary to increase Chinese guests for the local economy as a short-term target. The percentage of South Korean visitors is small even though there are regular flights. It is desired to increase South Korean visitors, for example by constructing a new market oriented strategy. Although there are some types of human exchange, friendship/sister-city tie-up can be thought of as a typical exchange. It is effective to promote educational and business exchanges based on a tie-up and to maintain a certain number of exchange people. And, it is important that the exchanging population is expanded. The number of partnered municipalities of foreign countries is about 90 in the Hokuriku region. The partner municipalities in China remains at a small rate (26 %), though Japan has some kinds of deep connections with China, especially in the economic field. There is a high potential to promote human exchange considering the Chinese population and bilateral distance.

The fundamental objective of image encoding is to transfer the image at high speed and transmit the image contents clearly. It is essential to reduce the use of memory capacity in the study on high speed transmission of images. However, the transfer time is determined by the total time of the following items: namely, encoding time, transfer time, and time to return to original image. Therefore, the investigation of high speed processing for encoding is also important. A consideration on image encoding is examined in this study, in which notable parts in a still image can be easily identified. The encoding process of an image, in which the notable parts are considered, is proposed specifically in this study, and a smoothing process is also proposed to decrease the image size and processing time so as not to degrade the image quality with the naked eye as much as possible. Moreover, this study proposes to increase the quality for high complexity images and degrade the quality for low image quality. Objects are extracted from the original image in the image encoding considering the notable parts and the original image is processed to understand easily using ‘outputting still image.’ And, the effectiveness of the proposed method is made clear by conducting comparative experiments with related other image encoding methods.

Multi-story car parking systems were invented to increase the capacity of car park buildings. However, it is pointed out that the systems have problems such as accidents (in-park movement, theft), searching for parking spaces, boarding/deboarding at narrow designated places, and difficulties in using for beginners and elderly people. To solve these issues, the authors of this paper propose to introduce electric pallets that are called automatic pallets for transporting vehicles and realize automated valet parking that automates procedures for entrance and exit. With the introduction of automatic pallets, a wide variety of vehicles can fit into specific configurations. This facilitates automation. Also, the authors propose a system for improving the time efficiency of exit operations. The time efficiency of automatic pallet exiting is improved by automatically repeating movement to approach the exit side elevator after entering. However, it is unclear how good the time efficient exit operation in that system is. Also, the authors decided to simulate the proposed auto valet parking to find out what kind of problems there are. A simulation was performed on the entering reception and the exit operation. In addition, although random numbers are used in the simulation, two random number generation methods were used for comparison.

Multistory car parking system garages were introduced to increase the capacity of parking garages. However, the systems have problems, such as accidents (intrapark movement and theft), searching for parking spaces, awkward boarding/deboarding at narrow designated places, and difficulties in their use by beginners and elderly people. Several studies have been conducted to address these issues. One was a proposal to introduce automatic and electric pallets for transporting vehicles, and to realize automated valet parking for entering and exiting. An electric pallet was equipped with its own sensor, which made it easier to move and realize a more effective use of space in a parking lot. However, evaluations of the capacity of the parking lot and the time efficiency of exiting demonstrated that the method was insufficient. We propose herein a method of moving automatic pallets that improves the time required for exiting in automated valet parking. Specifically, we propose to reduce the exit distance (distance to the exit) by changing how automatic pallets are moved. In this study, various sensors were introduced to move automatic pallets accurately. In addition, considering the material as the detection target of the sensor, we selected the parking lot and the passage in the multistory car park as options.

Recently, various issues in self-propelled multi-storey car parks are becoming social concerns: accidents thefts, difficulty in finding a parking space, limited space for getting in/out of cars, and less friendly environment for novice/elderly users. These issues can be solved by introducing a valet parking system where car parking staff receives a car key from a user and drive the car to the parking space. However, the operator of the parking system needs to employ these staff, which impacts negatively financially. This paper aims to solve these conflicting demands by proposing an automated valet parking system by incorporating automatic pallets, which are mobile parking spaces. An automatic pallet is an equipment dedicated specifically for transferring a car: it enables automatic entrance and exit procedures. The proposed system requires no human intervention and enables complete automated parking procedures.

The world economy has suffered great damage due to the COVID-19 pandemic. China and North Korea enforced some strict infection control measures and ‘zero-COVID strategy’ is adhered, which limits human behavior including interactions. Although Japan is a little loosely regulated, the economic situation is becoming tougher and Japan is turning to a ‘living with COVID strategy’, which is adopted in Western countries. Also, accepting measures of visitors for sightseeing purposes are being relaxed in Japan to avoid becoming a tourism isolated country. It is important that the trade volume does not stagnate more than anything. The following questionnaire survey is being conducted with foreigners entering Japan, namely choosing one of three categories (sightseeing, business, others) as the visiting purpose. The relationship between the number of visitors who chose the business-category as the visiting purpose and the total trade is examined in this paper. As a result, it is recognized that there is a relationship, except when COVID-19 is widespread, and also there is especially a correlation between the number of visitors for business from China, USA, Taiwan and Thailand (except for South Korea) and the total trade of those countries, and it can be indicated using a simple linear regression. Total trade could be understood to be unaffected largely by the outbreak of infectious disease. The increase or decrease of visitors for business could be predicted using the simple regression equation in normal time.

Existing display systems are sometimes insufficient to display the information to be conveyed. For example, a room temperature meter displays the room temperature as a bar graph or numerical value, but the sensible temperature differs depending on the season: the same 20 degrees centigrade can be cold in summer but warm in winter. Additionally, elderly people may have a dull sense of temperature and hence not notice the room temperature even if the change is significant. A display system showing not only the temperature but also the four seasons in the year, level of comfort and color code for danger (red: dangerous, yellow: caution, green: safe) can be easier for users to understand. However, displaying various information simultaneously can overburden the users since it requires intensive and swift processing of incoming information. To address these problems, this paper considers a display system with facial expressions: information to be displayed are translated to part and condition of the face to construct a face chart. The shape, size, position, color or movement of the chart are determined by the information. Morphological visual data transmission is superior in speed, recognizability, accuracy and multiple data transmissions. For human beings, faces are the most significant clue for identifying others. Facial expressions are mainly expressed by the muscles around the eyes. Eyes often shows the emotional state of the person. This paper aims to evaluate the effect of the display system using the features of facial expression. We first examine the accuracy of facial expressions of taste and emotion and their recognition by conducting questionnaire experiments. In the next step, we evaluate the ability of facial expression in simultaneous information transmission and its impact to observers. Finally, we propose an indoor environment display system using face expression as its application. Main results are as follows: as for taste, sweetness (76.5 %) and acidity (72.8 %) had high recognition rates; as for emotion, joy (96.3 %) and surprise (76.5 %) had high recognition rates; taste and joy matching experiments showed high matching rate between sweetness and joy (94.3 %); an experiment to evaluate a Japanese sweetshop showed sufficient simultaneous information transmission result (74.8 %); an experiment for time indication showed the facial expression method had the highest impact ability. These results show the effectiveness of facial expression system.

Japan has the lowest growth rate of GDP out of the seven developed countries. The main reason is as follows, namely many kinds of resources are concentrated in the urban areas such as Tokyo and Osaka. On the other hand, rural resources are scarce and the consumption effect by foreign visitors to Japan is expected in the areas. The visitor numbers from mainland China, South Korea, and Taiwan to Japan account for more than half of the total number of foreign tourists. This paper describes the relationship between the percentage of a good impression of Japan (or percentage of people who like Japan the most) and the tourism-purpose ratio of the visitors from these three areas. The coefficient of determination (cd) is introduced in the relationship between those ratios. As a result, large coefficients are obtained in the cases of South Korea and Taiwan, and the tourism purpose ratio could be predictable with high reliability using a regression equation by examining the good impression ratio in those two areas. The cd for China is small and it is difficult to predict the ratio using a regression equation. It is effective to adopt other methods such as artificial intelligence (AI) to predict the tourism purpose ratio because there are many factors between Japan and China.

Existing display systems are sometimes insufficient to display the information to be conveyed. For example, a room temperature meter displays the room temperature as a bar graph or numerical value, but the sensible temperature differs depending on the season: the same 20 degrees centigrade can be cold in summer but warm in winter. Additionally, elderly people may have a dull sense of temperature and hence not notice the room temperature even if the change is significant. A display system showing not only the temperature but also the four seasons in the year, level of comfort and color code for danger (red: dangerous, yellow: caution, green: safe) can be easier for users to understand. However, displaying various information simultaneously can overburden the users since it requires intensive and swift processing of incoming information. To address these problems, this paper considers a display system with facial expressions: information to be displayed are translated to part and condition of the face to construct a face chart. The shape, size, position, color or movement of the chart are determined by the information. Morphological visual data transmission is superior in speed, recognizability, accuracy and multiple data transmissions. For human beings, faces are the most significant clue for identifying others. Facial expressions are mainly expressed by the muscles around the eyes. Eyes often shows the emotional state of the person. This paper aims to evaluate the effect of the display system using the features of facial expression. We first examine the accuracy of facial expressions of taste and emotion and their recognition by conducting questionnaire experiments. In the next step, we evaluate the ability of facial expression in simultaneous information transmission and its impact to observers. Finally, we propose an indoor environment display system using face expression as its application. Main results are as follows: as for taste, sweetness (76.5 %) and acidity (72.8 %) had high recognition rates; as for emotion, joy (96.3 %) and surprise (76.5 %) had high recognition rates; taste and joy matching experiments showed high matching rate between sweetness and joy (94.3 %); an experiment to evaluate a Japanese sweetshop showed sufficient simultaneous information transmission result (74.8 %); an experiment for time indication showed the facial expression method had the highest impact ability. These results show the effectiveness of facial expression system.