Koji TSUKADA, Non-member, Keisuke KAMBARA, Non-member Computers become smaller and cheaper from day to day, and the utilization, as daily life equipments, is now becoming ubiquitous. Therefore, it's essential to discuss the development of applications, as well as the installation of ubiquitous computing technologies into our daily living environments. Based on this idea, in order to investigate how ubiquitous computing can be used in the most efficient way, an experimental house, Ocha House, has been constructed in the campus of Ochanomizu university in 2009. In this study, we described the feature of the design of the experimental house and proposed a non-invasive gait monitoring technique as a healthcare application. Specifically, five wireless accelerometers were fixed on the floor of the house, and the floor vibration was measured when the subject walked along the accelerometers. As a result, the floor acceleration intensity was found to surge at the ground contact, and the gait cycle could be detected. By combining the simple acceleration sensors and the housing structures, human motion monitoring would become less invasive.

"Low vision" is defined as uncorrectable vision loss that interferes with daily activities. The gazing behavior exhibited by people with low vision as they walk is particularly important because it illustrates how they utilize information in various environments. In this study, eight participants with low vision and eight fully sighted participants were asked to navigate a roadway and a sidewalk wearing a mobile eye-tracking device. Their gazing behavior and walking behavior were recorded and analyzed. As a result, on the roadway, participants with low vision walked while fixing their gazes mainly on the road surface and white traffic lines around 10 meters ahead, as well as on the buildings around 39 meters ahead. On the sidewalk, on the other hand, they walked while fixing their gaze on mainly the road surface and tactile paving seven to eight meters ahead, as well as on the buildings around 24 meters ahead. These findings suggest that people with low vision use not only nearby objects but also distant objects as visual cues. In addition, the importance of using continuous road surface markers, such as white traffic lines and tactile paving, to enable people with low vision to walk outdoors safely is suggested.

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