This paper presents the design of a system for a context-aware guidance service for hospital outpatients. Many patients have difficulties in knowing what to do and where to go due to the complexity of hospital-related processes and building structures. The intelligent hospital of the future will evolve in a smart way to automatically provide patients' smart mobile devices with relevant guidance information regarding their tasks, location, and process. In this study, we developed a context-aware-based hospital digital guidance system and evaluated ser satisfaction with respect to outpatient visits. From our pilot experiments with 15 outpatients, they were satisfied with the service. We believe that such a smart system would be a promising model for developing the intelligent hospitals of the future.

This paper presents a guideline for a hospital guidance system that provides outpatients with guidance about their process and location. When visiting general hospitals, outpatients often encounter difficulties in understanding the hospital process and in knowing where to go next during that process. To address this issue, we initially conducted an ethnographic interview of fifteen outpatients to determine their needs, interviewed hospital staff to discover exceptional cases, and then analyzed the hospital process for outpatients to uncover any timing difficulties so as to specify the proposed guidance service. Considering the findings of the user study and the result of a domain analysis, we formulated the outpatient guidance service. The outpatient guidance system is presented here as an example.

In this paper, we present CheMO, a system for tangible chemistry experiments where users can interact with Mixed Object (MO) instruments that consist of a graspable physical part in the real world and a digital part in a virtual world. When used for an experiment, MO instruments enable users to employ tangible interaction methods inherited from real experience and to be given digital information similar to a physical expression arising from an actual experiment. The goal of our research is to enhance the sense of reality in a virtual experiment and to enable users to learn experimental procedures effectively and easily.

This paper presents a novel electronic travel aid, called iSONIC, which can help a visually impaired person walk around more safely. Attached to a conventional white cane, the iSONIC detects obstacles at head-height that cannot be covered by a traditional cane and gives warnings in the forms of vibration or sound to avoid dangerous situations. We developed an algorithm to restrict the sensing range to reduce confusing and unnecessary detections and a method to remove the sensing errors due to the impact of ground tapping. In addition to obstacle detection, the iSONIC give information of object color and the environmental brightness when the user wants to know.

This paper introduces an electronic travel aid, named SmartWand, which detects obstacles using a ultrasonic sensor. In addition to obstacle detection, the SmartWand senses color information of objects and the environmental brightness. It is designed to be attached to a ordinary white cane in order to detect the obstacles at head-hight which cannot be covered by the cane. We have improved the first version of the SmartWand based on a user evaluation. The second version is much lighter and smaller than the previous one. It has been enhanced by two new functions. The SmartWand eliminates impact errors due to tapping the ground using a moving average filtering algorithm and restricts the detection range to the path in the moving direction using an acceleration sensor. We have tested these functions in various environments to determine the parameters for these functions.

In this paper, we present a haptic prototyping system using a torque-feedback dial, which allows one to estimate the haptic behaviors of the mechanical dial knob in the design process interactively. The system produces various high fidelity haptic effects based on the torque-feedback dial such as jog dial, detent, barrier, and a combination of these behaviors. It can be used to determine the most desirable knob behavior and physical properties for consumer electronics including automobile, washing machine, radio, and game controller. In addition, we have conducted experiments analyzing the haptic behavior's affect on the user's emotions and reactions.

This paper presents a knowledge model for spatiotemporal context awareness. The knowledge model is designed to understand user goals and to guide users who perform complicated tasks involving several routes, such as tasks at a hospital. An information system should be able to consider both the location and process context to provide relevant guidance regarding tasks, their location, and their process, as location and process information are collaboratively associated. A service that is both process- and- location-aware is considered, and a knowledge model that represents the semantics of the proposed process- and- location-aware service is given.

This paper presents a context-aware information service system for people with disabilities and for older adults. The system guides users who have difficulties in performing complicated tasks or finding paths at public places such as hospitals or government offices. The system is composed of sensor networks and a local information system which work together to gather the location and the process information, a user device which directly provides guidance to the user, and an information service server which understands the user context and provides guide contents.

We present a context-aware pictographic display system that facilitates the search for communication cards that bear some relation to the location and goal of the user. The system consists of a server and a mobile device: the server searches for relevant cards on the basis of the context, and then prioritizes them in terms of their relatedness; the mobile device displays pictographic cards according to the priority. This system can help people who have speech-language difficulties by reducing the searching time and difficulties, when the user wants to find the pictographic cards.

Recommendation, which selects the most relevant contents for users' preferences, is one of the decision support techniques. Content-based filtering (CBF) and collaborative filtering (CF) are widely used recommendation approaches. They only focus on whether the users would choose the recommendations or not. The current approaches do not concentrate on the problem of how the users select the favorite contents.This paper suggests an approach of learning users' decision making patterns in order to help the users to select favorite contents efficiently. The learning recommender methods have demerits such as cold start problem, which will be solved with our proposed fusion model in this study. The fusion model contains both learning methods and non-learning methods and reflects the users' decision-making patterns. For the effective recommendation, our proposed system have four user models: preference model, interest-contents group model, neighborhood model, and fusion model. A movie recommender system has been implemented as an application and the recommendation capability has been evaluated with the cold start problem.

An analysis patterns are conceptual and abstract models of domain to understand the domain and its problem. They support the analysis process and are useful of making and reusing of domain knowledge. Also, they can be transformed to more flexible design and apply for any specific domain or application and solve the problem. In this paper, we show the analysis patterns for information retrieval in intelligent responsive space (IRS). For our work, we describe the information retrieval (IR) analysis pattern with refined template for analysis patterns. And we applied IR analysis pattern for our specific domain to understand the domain and construct the ontology based knowledge base.

In this paper, we describe a news service system based on dialogue between human and robot in robot environments. Our goal is to enable users to listen to the news contents more effectively using service robot. Existing news services such as newspaper, TV news program, and Internet news depend on their media. People who want to acquire news contents must be skilled to deal with the media in the case of Internet news service. Also, such media as newspaper and TV also have time and space constraints. In order to solve these problems, we propose a dialogue-based news service which provides news contents through spoken language dialogue.For dialogue news service, a news knowledge model based on ontology was designed. The knowledge model is centered on not articles but news events. People are able to reorganize the contents of known events, and talk to others with brief sentences. Likewise, this system analyzes articles about events, reorganizes news contents and provides the news through spoken language dialogue. For more effective service, a personalized user model was suggested, which reflects not only topic preferences but also interaction patterns. The developed system called Dialogue-based News Service System (DNSS) provides personalized news contents using the user model and the news knowledge model.

This paper addresses the methodology development far the automated machining setup planning system using case-based reasoning(CBR). The case-based reasoning is used to develop a setup planning system. which consists of part input and representation module, case retrieval module, and case adaptation module. We present new approaches in the part input and representation module and the case retrieval module focusing on the similarity index determination. An illustrative example is included to demonstrate the proposed method.

Extensive information is required within a R&D environment, and a considerable amount of time and efforts are being spent on finding the necessary information. An adaptive information providing system would be beneficial to the environment, and a conceptual model of the resources, people and context is mandatory for developing such applications. In this paper, an information model on various contexts and resources is proposed which provides the possibility of effective applications for use in adaptive information systems within a R&D project and meeting environment. Keywords— Adaptive Hypermedia, Adaptive System, Context Awareness, Information Model, Information System, Personalisation.

In the information retrieval process, the selection of keywords and the generation of queries are very critical for the efficient retrieval. However, users experience the difficulties of selecting major keywords without being aware of the domain context. This paper proposes an automatic query generation method using n-Keyword expansion model, which consists of keyword extraction, keyword expansion and query generation. This method uses context model, semantic thesaurus and ontology. The keyword extraction is for finding document annotation data and document instances that are inferred from ontology and making the list of document keyword. n- Keyword, keywords expanded from the user input keyword, is constructed by selecting candidate keywords and assigning weight value to each candidate keyword from semantic thesaurus and document keyword list after consideration of context models. The query generation expands and generates the query using weighted keywords and query patterns. In retrieval for documents, n-Keyword using semantic thesaurus makes more useful query than users' keyword.

An ontology as the core technology of semantic web is an explicit specification of a conceptualization. The ontology has been proposed as an important tool for expressing real world knowledge by conceptual modeling, and provides a basis for effectively managing the knowledge. In this work, an ontology for R&D project management meeting is designed and established. Various meetings and related data accompanied in the progress of R&D projects are to be managed for successful projects. Information sharing and data retrieval are difficult for meeting attendants, and management for meeting data is not systematic. An ontology is designed and implemented by analyzing and classifying the meeting and related data in R&D project meeting systematically. Thereafter this can be applied to meeting management and service provision of an intelligent meeting examples.