No abstract

Abstract-Various factors are believed to cause blinking. One of these factors is attention. However, the relationship between blinking and attention has not yet been elucidated. In this study, we focus on electrodermal activity (EDA) to demonstrate this relationship. EDA is an electrical phenomenon involving the glandular releasing of sweat that is caused by mental excitement or strain. We employ EDA to quantify attention as a means to elucidate the blinking-attention relationship. We conduct an experiment based on EDA and present the results to verify this relationship.

This paper proposes a real-time eyelid state recognition method based on a video sequence. The human eye strongly reflects the mental state of an individual, such as attention, drowsiness, stress and confusion. In recent times, the automatic identification of such mental states using non-contact eyelid state recognition technology is proving to be a promising avenue for the development of such systems. In the field of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS), high accuracy and real-time processing are necessary for detecting driver drowsiness in order to prevent accidents. To develop such a recognition method, we use Higher-order Local Auto-Correlation (HLAC). HLAC can represent the shape feature in images clearly without incurring a high computational cost, and it implements position invariability. A Support Vector Machine (SVM) is used to differentiate between open and closed eyelids on the basis of the HLAC feature. The proposed method can achieve open and closed eyelid recognition rates of 98.77% and 98.98%, respectively. We also verify the real-time processing capabilities of our method, thus confirming that it is effective for eyelid state recognition.

Electrodermal Activity (EDA) refers to change in the electrical properties of skin during mental exertion caused by tension and agitation. In recent studies, it has been revealed that there is an overlap between the brain activation area where emotion occurs and the brain activation area responsible for attentiveness. Consequently, in this paper we test our hypothesis that, given these findings, visual attention can be estimated via EDA. The results of experiments conducted verify that EDA can be used as an attention index.

Various factors are believed to cause blinking. One of these factors is attention. However, the relationship between blinking and attention has not yet been elucidated. In this study, we focus on electrodermal activity (EDA) to demonstrate this relationship. EDA is an electrical phenomenon involving the glandular releasing of sweat that is caused by mental excitement or strain. We employ EDA to quantify attention as a means to elucidate the blinking-attention relationship. We conduct an experiment based on EDA and present the results to verify this relationship.

A control method for passing through an intersection for automated vehicles is proposed. If automated vehicles approaching an intersection communicate with each other and schedule the time of entering the intersection by small deceleration and acceleration, the vehicles can pass the through the intersection without stopping thereby enabling energy-saving by reducing unnecessary deceleration. This study proposes a method of categorizing intersection patterns, and extracting the required conditions for the realization of a non-stop intersection for each intersection pattern, performing control to realize such an intersection and transmitting information to vehicles entering the intersection for the creation of a virtual platoon. The proposed method is validated by experiments at an intersection of one-way traffic in single lanes.

This paper presents an ankle-foot device using a Stewart platform, which is a type of parallel-link mechanism, for trip prevention support. The developed device can reproduce the input motions of the ankle joint in six degrees of freedom by controlling six pneumatic cylinders at the same time. The root mean square errors of the 3-D position and rotation angle of the reproduced motions with the input motions (dorsiflexion and plantar flexion) were 6.3 mm and 3.0°, respectively. Verification experiments for trip prevention support performance were conducted by comparing motions in each walking condition measured using a motion capture system. The experimental results showed that the minimum foot clearance during mid-swing and initial swing increased significantly by the trip prevention support offered by the developed device. The developed device can perform passive exercises for ankle rehabilitation and support walking for trip prevention.

No abstract