Kunihiko Kido

Portable single-channel NIRS-based BMI system for motor disabilities' communication tools

A portable near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) -based brain-machine Interface (BMI) system featuring single-channel probe, BMI controller and Infrared-emission apparatus was developed. As a switching technology for external devices, the threshold logic was proposed, which detects the blood volume change in the operators frontal lobe. Experiments showed that the operator was able to change the TV programs or get forward the toy robot within 16 s (the mean is 11.77 s and the standard deviation is 2.35 s) after the mental calculation. In addition, the menu selection program was proposed for motor disabilities and the preliminary test showed that he could successively select the sentence from several candidates. It was shown that this system would provide the external devices control capabilities for motor disabilities.

Improvement of MRI image quality by a directional adaptive filter

In this paper, an image processing method for improving the quality of MRI images is proposed. The directions of various structural elements such as edges are extracted, and a directional adaptive filter is proposed as a one-dimensional smoothing process in the detected directions. The result of applying directional adaptive filtering to MRI images, along with reducing the noise while minimizing structural element degradations, is that the contrast of soft tissue regions can be improved. MRI images have the characteristic of providing high contrast for soft tissue regions, but do not provide very high resolution. Directional adaptive filters are investigated and are shown to be particularly effective for images that possess these qualities, and the MRI performance level is compared to that obtained on X-ray CT images.

Socio-technical issues for ubiquitous information society in 2010

The impact of ubiquitous information technology on society has been so powerful that it has generated an urgent and immediate need for directing technological development and preparing institutional apparatus. This paper endeavors to identify and predict the socio-technical issues that face the ubiquitous information society by 2010, by investigating the social implications of emerging technology, as well as social expectations. To study the issues, we developed scenarios that describe hypothetical situations in the ubiquitous information society. The derived issues cover integrating information technology and human body, producing smart sharable environments, protecting individual rights, fostering new service businesses, and forming self-evolving communities.