The purpose of this study was to investigate the protective effect of a glass ionomer cement (GIC) consisting of fluoro-zinc-silicate glass on the demineralization of bovine dentin using the ultrasonic pulse-echo method. The findings were compared with those obtained using a conventional GIC. Slabs of dentin from bovine teeth were sliced, shaped into a rectangular form, and immersed in 0.5 M ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid solution at 25ºC for 6 days, followed by storage in distilled water for 3 days. After demineralization, they were immersed in artificial saliva with and without the GIC specimens. The propagation times of the longitudinal ultrasonic waves in the samples were measured. The ultrasonic velocities of the fluoro-zinc-silicate glass-containing GICs were significantly increased 2-3 days after the start of the experiment and showed an upward trend thereafter. These findings indicate that the GICs containing fluoro-zinc-silicate glass might exhibit the potential to promote remineralization in the dentin.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the immediate shear bond strength of resin composite luting systems to tooth with or without saliva contamination in different curing modes. The Knoop hardness number of the resin composite luting agents was measured. Four combinations of resin composite luting systems were used. The shear bond strength to bovine teeth was measured with and without saliva contamination in different curing modes at different storage periods. The Knoop hardness number of the resin composite luting agents was also evaluated. Significantly lower enamel and dentin shear bond strengths and Knoop hardness number values were observed in all resin composite luting systems at 5 min versus 24 h, regardless of the curing mode or saliva contamination. The influence of the curing mode of the resin composite luting systems on shear bond strengths and Knoop hardness number was dependent on material. For the saliva contamination conditions, only G-CEM ONE EM did not show any significant difference in shear bond strength among the groups with and without saliva contamination, regardless of curing mode, storage period, or tooth substrate. All the resin composite luting systems showed lower shear bond strengths and Knoop hardness number values immediately after setting.

Estimating sleeping postures with body joint positions is critical for identifying potential sleeping problems and the risk of pressure ulcers. Many methods have estimated postures with body joint positions from camera images for general purposes. However, visual monitoring of sleeping contexts suffers from privacy and occlusion issues due to blankets, pillows, etc. An approach to solve those issues is the use of body pressure images obtained from bed surfaces. We have developed a textile-based sheet-type pressure sensor to avoid such issues. Unfortunately, its use raises other issues that are absent from camera images such as low resolution and noise caused by the wrinkling of sensor sheets. In this paper, we extend DNN-based joint estimation, called Convolutional Pose Machine (CPM), using body area and posture estimation mashups to improve the accuracy of joint estimation. The following are our evaluation results with cross-validation with 16 joints in six sleeping postures of 12 subjects: 7.15 cm accuracy in mean absolute error (MAE), which is a 33.7% improvement from the standard CPM, and 8.52 cm accuracy in MAE, which is a 37.4% improvement from CPM with camera images in situations using a pillow and a blanket.