With the spread of smart devices, people may obtain a variety of information on their surrounding environment thanks to sensing technologies. To design more context-aware systems, psychological user context (e.g., emotional status) is a substantial factor for providing useful information in an appropriate timing. As a typical use case that has a high demand for context awareness but is not tackled widely yet, we focus on the tourism domain. In this study, we aim to estimate the emotional status and satisfaction level of tourists during sightseeing by using unconscious and natural tourist actions. As tourist actions, behavioral cues (eye and head/body movement) and audiovisual data (facial/vocal expressions) were collected during sightseeing using an eye-gaze tracker, physical-activity sensors, and a smartphone. Then, we derived high-level features, e.g., head tilt and footsteps, from behavioral cues. We also used existing databases of emotionally rich interactions to train emotion-recognition models and apply them in a cross-corpus fashion to generate emotional-state prediction for the audiovisual data. Finally, the features from several modalities are fused to estimate the emotion of tourists during sightseeing. To evaluate our system, we conducted experiments with 22 tourists in two different touristic areas located in Germany and Japan. As a result, we confirmed the feasibility of estimating both the emotional status and satisfaction level of tourists. In addition, we found that effective features used for emotion and satisfaction estimation are different among tourists with different cultural backgrounds.

This paper investigates gamification mechanisms and their application for promoting participatory urban sensing. Participatory sensing, which utilizes user smartphones as sensors, is focused on as an effective and economical sensing mechanism for wide areas. However, countinuing to motivate many participants for a long time is difficult. In addition, monetary incentives are limited generally. To solve these problems, gamification mechanisms are considered one promising technique because they have the potential to suppress monetary incentives by maintaining the motivation of participants. In addition to a general survey, we introduce our past practical research results on gamified participatory urban sensing.

Recently, due to the drastic increase in foreign tourists coming to Japan, there has been a demand to provide smart tourism services that enable inbound tourists to comfortably enjoy sightseeing. To provide satisfactory experiences for tourists, it is desirable to provide tourist information in a timely manner by considering dynamic information, which is information that changes over time, such as current congestion information in destination spots and travel route information, in addition to static information, such as the preferences and profiles of tourists. However, in many existing systems, serious problems occur, such as (1) a lack of support for on-site use, (2) a lack of consideration of dynamic information, and (3) heavy burden on tourists. In this paper, we propose a novel system that can provide tourism plans for tourism spots in a timely manner. The proposed system consists of the following two key mechanisms: (A) A mechanism for acquiring preference information from tourists (including preference on dynamic information); (B) a curation mechanism for realizing on-site tourism. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system, we carried out evaluation experiments utilizing real tourism spots and simulations. As a result, we obtained the following primary findings: (1) On-site tourism spot recommendation is effective for tourists who do not make detailed tourism plans before sightseeing; (2) preference information for participants can be reflected in the tourism spot recommendation while massively reducing the burden on participants; (3) it is possible to obtain a higher satisfaction level than is achieved with model courses, which are often used for sightseeing.

The emergence of various types of commercial cameras (compact, high resolution, high angle of view, high speed, and high dynamic range, etc.) has contributed significantly to the understanding of human activities. By taking advantage of the characteristic of a high angle of view, this paper demonstrates a system that recognizes micro-behaviors and a small group discussion with a single 360 degree camera towards quantified meeting analysis. We propose a method that recognizes speaking and nodding, which have often been overlooked in existing research, from a video stream of face images and a random forest classifier. The proposed approach was evaluated on our three datasets. In order to create the first and the second datasets, we asked participants to meet physically: 16 sets of five minutes data from 21 unique participants and seven sets of 10 min meeting data from 12 unique participants. The experimental results showed that our approach could detect speaking and nodding with a macro average f1-score of 67.9% in a 10-fold random split cross-validation and a macro average f1-score of 62.5% in a leave-one-participant-out cross-validation. By considering the increased demand for an online meeting due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we also record faces on a screen that are captured by web cameras as the third dataset and discussed the potential and challenges of applying our ideas to virtual video conferences.

Changing behavior related to improper lifestyle habits has attracted attention as a solution to prevent lifestyle diseases, such as diabetes, heart disease, arteriosclerosis, and stroke. To drive health behavior changes, wearable devices are needed, and they must not only provide accurate sensing and visualization functions but also effective intervention functions. In this paper, we propose a health support system, WaistonBelt X, that consists of a belt-type wearable device with sensing and intervention functions and a smartphone application. WaistonBelt X can automatically measure a waistline with a magnetometer that detects the movements of a blade installed in the buckle, and monitor the basic activities of daily living with inertial sensors. Furthermore, WaistonBelt X intervenes with the user to correct lifestyle habits by using a built-in vibrator. Through evaluation experiments, we confirmed that our proposed device achieves measurement of the circumference on the belt position (mean absolute error of 0.93 cm) and basic activity recognition (F1 score of 0.95) with high accuracy. In addition, we confirmed that the intervention via belt vibration effectively improves the sitting posture of the user.

Much garbage is produced daily in homes due to living activities, including cooking and eating. The garbage must be adequately managed for human well-being and environmental protection. Although the existing IoT-based smart garbage systems have gained high garbage classification accuracy, they still have a problem that they provide a small number of garbage categories, not enough for reasonable practices of household garbage separation. This study presents a new smart garbage bin system, SGBS, embedded with multiple sensors to solve the problem. We deployed temperature, humidity, and gas sensors to know the condition and identify the garbage content disposed of. Then, we introduce a new garbage content estimation method by training a machine learning model using daily collected fuse sensor readings combined with detailed household garbage contents annotations to perform garbage classification tasks. For evaluation, we deployed the designed SGBS in five households over one month. As a result, we confirmed that the leave-one-house cross-validation results showed an accuracy of 91% in 5 kitchen waste contents, also, 89% in 5 paper/softbox contents, and 85% in the 8 garbage categories for the classification tasks.