Objectives: Normal activity monitoring methods are mainly useful for relatively healthy and ablebodied people, but are not necessarily appropriate for elderly persons who may have difficulty in walking, or for the frail who may be bedridden. The purpose of this study was to examine 24-hour heart rate recording for the comparison of activity levels in daily life of elderly persons of different ambulatory abilities.Methods: Forty-two elderly females (mean, 82.1 years old) volunteered to participate in this study. The subjects were divided into four groups on the basis of their ambulatory status, and their 24-hour heart rate recordings were compared with their results of activity assessments.Results: The results of activity assessments showed a tendency to decrease as the ambulatory ability of the group decreased. The "total heart beats", calculated as the sum of all heart rates over 24 hours, were almost the same among the four groups, and therefore did not show a similar tendency. However, the "total excess-beats product (TEBP)" correlated with the results of activity assessments. TEBP was calculated as the sum of all differences in beats between each heart rate in 24 hours and the mean heart rate during sleeping at night. Therefore, TEBP may reflect a more active state than the bedridden state.Conclusions: These results suggest that comparison of activity levels in daily life using 24-hour heart rate recording might be possible by the calculation of TEBP, and that this method might be useful for the comparison of the activity levels of elderly persons of diffent ambulatory abilities.

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Abstract. We developed a new augmented communications environment which aims to engender a greater sense of social proximity to geographically distributed family members and improve their emotional well-being. First, a field study was conducted to determine important peripheral communication cues for sensing presence and mood of family members as well as memory triggers. Secondly, the design principles were extracted from the study results to guide the development of a first-of-a-kind prototype, the "SharedEpisodes" that delivers visual peripheral cues along the line with the story of family episodes. Finally, an initial field evaluation was conducted. Overall responses of the participants indicated positive for this type of communications environment that supports the awareness of the presence and state of family members, and the exchange of peripheral communication cues based on family episodes. Future works involve methodological improvement and prototype enhancements including the choice of alternative modality.

The purpose of this study was to estimate daily energy expenditure (EE) and daily activity factor (DAF: EE/basal metabolism -1) of junior high school students in Japan using heart rate (HR) monitoring method. Daily activity recording and 24 hour HR monitoring were measured in all the subjects. The relational formulas between HR and oxygen consumption were obtained from bicycle ergometer test. Subjects were 112 junior high school students (68 male and 44 female) from the 1st to the 3rd year. The averages ofEE (kcal/kg) of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd year students were 54.3, 46.7, and 44.5 (kcal/kg) for males and 50.1, 44.4, and 40.5 (kcal/kg) for females respectively. In the same way DAF were 0.80, 0.61, and 0.59 for males and 0.77, 0.65, and 0.51 for females. It was shown that EE (kcal/kg) and DAF have a tendency to decrease as school year increases in both male and female students.

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