comprises an amazing diversity of living organisms. Early man could easily perceive the difference between inanimate matter and living organisms. Early man deified some of the inanimate matter (wind, sea, fire etc.) and some among the animals and plants. A common feature of all such forms of inanimate and animate objects was the sense of awe or fear that they evoked. The description of living o...

In this paper, we develop a force-reflection joystick system for VR-based simulation, including a 2-DOF joystick and the related software. The developed force-reflection joystick, as a kind of haptic device, provides two-way communication in both position and force, and is very helpful for the user to interact with a simulation system. By considering the main factors in designing a force-reflec...

The text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis is widely used in the area of assistive technologies for visually impaired people as well as for people with dyslexia or related learning disabilities. In the case of multilingual text-to-speech synthesis, both the language identification and voice switching are desirable. This paper presents the implementation of a multilingual text-to-speech in two assistive...

The increased prevalence of chronic disease in elderly people is placing requirements for new approaches to support efficient health status monitoring and reporting. Advances in sensor technologies have provided an opportunity to perform continuous point-of-care physiological and activityrelated measurement and data capture. Context-aware physiological pattern analysis with regard to activity p...

This paper describes a wearable augmented reality system using positioning infrastructures and a pedometer. To realize augmented reality systems, the position and orientation of user’s viewpoint should be obtained in real time. The proposed system measures the orientation of user’s viewpoint by an inertial sensor and the user’s position using positioning infrastructures in environments and a pe...

An ever-increasing number of personal photos is stored online. This trend can be problematic, because face recognition software can undermine user privacy in unexpected ways. Face de-identification aims to prevent automatic recognition of faces thus improving user privacy, but previous work alters the image in a way that makes them indistinguishable for both computers and humans, which prevents...

Google Glass has potential to be a real-time data capture and annotation tool. With professional sports as a use-case, we present a platform which helps a football coach capture and annotate interesting events using Google Glass. In our implementation, an interesting event is indicated by a predefined hand gesture or motion, and our platform can automatically detect these gestures in a video wi...

We present work in progress in the application of Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology to the analysis of textual transcriptions of psychotherapy sessions in the Spanish Language. We are developing a set of NLP tools as well as adapting an existing dictionary for the analysis of interviews framed on a psychoanalytic theory. We investigate the application of NLP techniques, including dic...

The problem of mapping human close-range proximity networks has been tackled using a variety of technical approaches. Wearable electronic devices, in particular, have proven to be particularly successful in a variety of settings relevant for research in social science, complex networks and infectious diseases dynamics. Each device and technology used for proximity sensing (e.g., RFIDs, Bluetoot...