Published papers

We have been implementing the research work in order to achieve the rural clinics that can provide the similar quality of clinic performance as that of urban general hospitals. The research work involves the use of common fund in community, from the financial viewpoint, for the purpose of continuous management of clinics in rural villages of developing countries, and the introduction of telemedicine system from the viewpoint of medical quality improvement. Our research fields have been rural villages near Hanoi, Vietnam1). This report is a result of another research work concerning the telemedicine for the clinics of rural villages, covering from the introduction of the vertical integration-type medicine management pursuing the possibility of quality improvement measures in the healthcare at the Vietnamese rural villages through the field research at the Hanoi, the capital city of Vietnam as well as the hub of the IT technology.

Designing amorphous systems is challenging because of the broad scope of the task. The design team must integrate various solution elements, such as hardware, software, service, and infrastructure, while resolving the communication challenges among different domain-experts. Scenario-based Design for Amorphous Systems enables design teams to effectively deal with ambiguity and to communicate their ideas among team members and managers, as well as with customers through a common language. We validated its effectiveness in both academia and industry. This paper describes the process and the preliminary results of the validation based on three approaches: Statistical, voting and interviews. © 2010 by Sun K. Kim.

We investigated medical practitioners laws in the United States, Japan and Taiwan, each country's limits and barriers against telemedicine existed. Therefore, we tried to prove that our proposed high-realistic video communication systems can overcome the legal limitations. According to experiments, we concluded that GI-POF is a useful solution of improving telemedicine. Evidence showed that it supports transmit noncompressed Full HD images since the keys are real-time and authenticity of image.

© The Author(s) 2017. The purpose of this paper is to realize an inexpensive optical module which reduces connection precision using the GI-POF with Ballpoint-pen connection[1]. Specifically, an optical simulation using Zemax OpticStudioTM [2] is conducted to understand the influence of axial and angle misalignment of the optical module with the Ballpoint-pen connection.

We will report the problem point and the issue of the wiring for residence, and then reveal that the Plastic Optical Fiber is very suitable for the wiring of the home network of recent date. And we report that our newly developed PCP GI POF (Partially chlorinated polymer based GI POF) will be just fit to wire in the house. It has several features such as high-bandwidth, large core diameter, high numerical aperture, and high thermal resistance. © 2012 ICPOF.

© 2014 ICPOF. Japan is an aging society. Rural medical clinics in Japan are especially struggling with a shortage of doctors and nurses. We describe an internet consultation and remote conference system designed to improve the quality of medical care in rural areas [1]. The system employs telemedicine to conduct virtual conference consultations, enabling doctors to provide their opinions and offer solutions to clinical problems, thereby providing healthcare to an aging society. In order to enjoy a long life through the stages of aging, a healthy and active lifestyle is necessary. In recent years, the use of ICT (information and communication technology) has become increasingly popular among seniors. In view of the changing communication environment, we used an application in which both high-speed GI-POF (graded index plastic optical fiber) network and flexible cable materials are required. We also considered the idea of spirituality while providing remote medical consultations to an aging society through ICT.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd 2020. The medical robotics market in the global healthcare industry have spread and extended in these several years. Internet of Medical Robotics Things (IoMRT) is also growing and Internet of Things is extending a new field of healthcare application. Whereas, the previous paper suggested that, in the field of robotics, the cloud platforms for Internet of Robotics Things (IoRT) were gradually developed; therefore, the digital platform and architecture for IoMRT of the healthcare industries should be formulated when necessary. An open healthcare platform for IoMRT is expected to promote and implement the robotics and the IoMRT applications for medical and healthcare communities efficiently. In this paper, we suggest that various medical robotics and the IoMRT-related applications will be designed and verified, while the open platform for medical, healthcare-related Robotics should be proposed and verified by the research initiative named “Open Healthcare Platform 2030–OHP2030.” In addition, the vision for enabling medical robotics and the IoMRT-related applications in the OHP2030 research initiative is explained.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019. Nowadays, the globalization is rapidly increasing and many Japanese employees are going overseas. The first author has experienced assignment in the Philippines for globalization, but the first author had a stumbling block in work-related communication with the local workers and felt difficulty to adopt globalization. Our interviews confirmed that most Japanese IT workers assigned to the Philippines had similar experiences that the problem was difficult to take measures in advance. A sense of unease was revealed in surveys conducted in 2002 by Nishida on intercultural communication frictions in Japanese companies in the Philippines entitled “Japanese Cultural Differences Felt by Filipinos” and “Roles Sought From Japanese Bosses and Leaders by Filipinos”. Although many studies have been done on communication and interpersonal relations and it is often stated that conscious communication from the initial stages is vital to building interpersonal relationships, there are still few practical studies on the matter. Instead of initial stage communication, we focused on the first meeting conversation, conducted questionnaires on topics selection among Japanese and Filipino IT workers, verified differences in topic selection mutually using quantitative evaluation, and reported investigative results on possible reason why smooth interpersonal relationships could not be built from the initial stages.

© 2017 IEEE. Several studies indicate that roughly 70% of the projects based on the software development have resulted in failure, thereby researchers and practitioners have been tried to develop solutions that will improve project success rates. It is insisted that to raise success rates, support should be provided by the organization to which the projects belong. With the aid of predictions that incorporate project outcomes for various information technology (IT) vendors, this study aims at identifying projects that should be preferentially supported by an organization. The data of 332 projects of various Japanese IT vendors were collected using an Internet survey, and a success/failure prediction algorithm is created by employing the Bayes classifier technique on the collected data. A resultant algorithm with 77.3% prediction capability was obtained. It is expected that the success/failure prediction procedure, including the prediction algorithm, help significantly to specify projects that an organization needs to participate in as priority.

A 10GBASE-SR(IEEE802.3ae) network [1] using 16km total length graded-index plastic optical fibers (GI-POF) [2∼6] was installed in a new building of Keio University completed in January, 2014. The optical network enables to communicate ultra-high-definition (UHD) video traffic for the university's increasing demand of education and research activities using high quality moving pictures. Because no standard for GI-POF cabling system has ever existed, quality guarantee was one of the biggest concerns for the GI-POF maker and users. To reduce the risk, we established a network configuration, and also set criteria of the BERT (Bit Error Rate Tester) characteristics and the frequency response based on previous studies. The GI-POF cables were inspected in accordance with the new criteria in advance to the building installation, and the network performance was evaluated after the installation. As a conclusion, the new evaluation method of 10Gbps GI-POF cabling system for the building installation was verified.

We have developed an optical I/O connector embedded using optical collimator lenses fabricated with well-defined and proven ball-point pen technology. The collimator lens consists of a glass-ball lens and a plastic optical fiber (POF) in a ball-point pen type metal sleeve. The POF is point-crimped in the sleeve without any adhesives. This enables a reliable fiber assembly without any damage to the POF, because the sensitive fiber end-facet is protected by the surrounding glass-ball and metal sleeve. The coupling loss is as low as 3dB, including Fresnel losses between engaged plug and receptacle collimator lenses. This optical I/O connection scheme has encouraged us to promote the POF as a cost-effective interconnection medium into the consumer electronics market. © 2012 ICPOF.

© 2014 ICPOF. A micro optical collimator using the world's fastest GI POF and ball-point pen manufacturing technology was developed for future consumer electronics applications which require high speed and ease of use optical communication. However, because of the metal sleeve of the ball-point pen component, inside of the sleeve was invisible and hard to know the accuracy of precise assembly without destructive quality check. We evaluated relationship between the degree of output beam spread and the distance of lens and fiber using the sleeveless measurement apparatus and understood that beam spread angle could tell the accuracy of precision assembly. The assembling techniques and conditions of the optical micro-collimator adopting ball-point pen technology were optimized and confirmed as highly precision assembling of ±0.01 mm accuracy of the distance between ball lens and GI POF.

Cooperation and collaboration within companies have become increasingly important for companies to handle complicated projects and create new businesses. Besides that, as a methodology to encourage cooperation and collaboration among people with different backgrounds, the development of dialogue theory and practice has attracted attention in the 2010s. In this research, focusing on Generative Dialogue (GD) (Isaacs, 1999: 38-41) which is highly emergent in cooperation and collaboration among dialog research, we proposed a design method using Systems Engineering method and verified its effectiveness in qualitatively and quantitatively way. For constructing a concrete design model, at the functional design level, functions required for GD include functions to participate in dialogue, to become active in cooperating with others, to enhance the sense of elevation of participants, to have a sense of unity, and to give participant's performance. And at the physical design level, we designed a workshop to generate GD that can be deployed within the enterprise companies using these five functions.Furthermore, in order to qualitatively and quantitatively verify the effectiveness of the proposed GD design, in a company witnessed the typical existence of Japanese SMEs, we conducted a GD generation workshop designed by this research, We showed the effectiveness of the workshop qualitatively and quantitatively by observation of participation, PANAS, Interdependent Happiness Scale, and text mining of participants' remarks. By conducting a workshop at the company's site and obtaining high satisfaction from the participants, it shows possibilities to expand the GD generation workshop as a replicable model to promote collaboration and collaboration in companies and other entities.

It has become possible enough to take telemedicine by progression of the ICT. However, telesurgery is limited to experimental trials. This reason is that surgeon had been disturbed perceptual motor coordination by visual delay. This study was analyzed to understand about range of work efficiency in telesurgery with the delay. As a result of analysis, it was suggested that pointing task has threshold of the difficulty between 2 mm and 4 mm in diameter. The similar range in the work efficiency was up to approximately 300 ms independent on pointing size.