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SUMMARYThe present study aims to investigate the effect of voluntary movements on human temporal perception in multisensory integration. We therefore performed temporal order judgment (TOJ) tasks in audio-tactile integration under three conditions: no movement, involuntary movement, and voluntary movement. It is known that the point of subjective simultaneity (PSS) under the no movement condition, that is, normal TOJ tasks, appears when a tactile stimulus is presented before an auditory stimulus. Our experiment showed that involuntary and voluntary movements shift the PSS to a value that reduces the interval between the presentations of auditory and tactile stimuli. Here, the shift of the PSS under the voluntary movement condition was greater than that under the involuntary movement condition. Remarkably, the PSS under the voluntary movement condition appears when an auditory stimulus slightly precedes a tactile stimulus. In addition, a just noticeable difference (JND) under the voluntary movement condition was smaller than those under the other two conditions. These results reveal that voluntary movements alternate the temporal integration of audio-tactile stimuli. In particular, our results suggest that voluntary movements reverse the temporal perception order of auditory and tactile stimuli and improve the temporal resolution of temporal perception. We discuss the functional mechanism of shifting the PSS under the no movement condition with voluntary movements in audio-tactile integration.

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Currently, due to shortages in the nursing faculty and low access to actual patients, it is difficult for students to receive feedback from teachers and practice with actual patients to obtain clinic experience. Thus, both evaluation systems and simulated patients have become urgent requirements. Accordingly, this study proposes a method to evaluate the nurse’s transfer skill through observation from the patient. After verifying the proposed method, it will be integrated with a robotic patient as a future work. To verify if such an evaluation is practical, a checklist comprising 16 steps with correct and incorrect methods was proposed by the nursing teachers. Further, the evaluation parameters were determined as translational acceleration, rotational speed, and joint angle of patient. Inertial sensors and motion capture were employed to measure the translational acceleration, rotational speed, and joint angle. An experiment was conducted with two nursing teachers, who were asked to carry out both correct and incorrect methods. According to the results, three parameters reveal the difference for a patient under correct/incorrect methods and can further be used to evaluate the nurse’s skill once the thresholds are determined. In addition, the applicability of inertial sensors is confirmed for the use of robot development.