Hands Free Research Articles

Effect of Hands-Free manual on emergency Secession and its verification

Currently, about 340,000 people in Japan are receiving hemodialysis, a treatment that draws blood from a patient’s vein, purifies it in a hemodialysis circuit, and returns the blood to the artery. It is necessary to have a plan in place for emergency evacuation of dialysis patients and personnel after disconnecting the blood circuit from the patient and interrupting the treatment. It takes 30 minutes to evacuate, and 40 minutes to complete the evacuation. To shorten this time, six immature people also need to participate in the evacuation work. A proper manual is needed to enable unskilled persons to safely and quickly with draw from the work area. We have developed a prototype manual (Augmented Reality (AR) Hands-Free (HF) manual) that contains operation information using AR and operation function using Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based voice recognition to the actual image on the Smart Glass (SG). The AR HF manual and conventional paper manual were compared in terms of the time required and the accuracy. It was 22/154, the AR HF manual was 3/140, and the withdrawal time was reduced to less than 20 minutes with the use of the AR HF manual.

Assessment of fatigue caused by VDT operation

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in smart glasses (SG) incorporating augmented reality (AR) technology. The most remarkable feature of SG is that users can execute tasks with both hands while getting necessary information while without taking their eyes off the task at hand. Such hands-free (HF) access to information can help prevent contamination. We are engaged in developing HF manuals for medical applications using SG. Use of SG could be expected to be associated with eye strain and headaches, but these could also occur when the users read manuals displayed on a LCD display (PC) or manuals printed on paper (Paper). In order to compare the effects of presentation of manuals in different modalities, 77 randomly selected students and faculty members were assigned to read HF (n=27), PC (n=40), and Paper (n=10) manual. The degree of eye strain induced by each presentation was compared by the flicker value, blinking frequency, high frequency component (HFC), pulse rate and “subjective symptoms”1), before and after loading for an hour. The results revealed less fatigue in the group assigned to HF as compared to the other groups. Therefore, there are no major obstacles to HF manual development.

Effects of Hands-Free Device Conversation and Operation on Driving Performance

The aim of this study was to examine impacts of cell phone conversation and operation on the driving performance. Ten male students participated in following two experiments: one is to examine the effect of cell phone conversation on driving performance, and the other is to examine the effect of cell phone operation while driving. In the former experiment, the subjects performed No-task and conversation (cognitive tasks) with hands-free (HF) and hand-held (HH) cell phone while driving in city traffic in which the maximum speed limit is 40 km/h. In the latter experiment, they were instructed to operate (dialing or talking) HH and HF such as touch screen, earphone, and voice recognition while driving. We measured driving performance, heart rate, eye tracking, and NASA-TLX. The results were as follows: (1) Regardless of phone type, cell phone conversation while driving increased the drivers' psychophysiological stress and also had negative impacts on the driving performance. (2) Break reaction time in response to pop-up event was significantly slower in operation of both HH and all hands-free kits than in No-task. The results suggest that using all hands-free cell phone while driving is not safer than hand-held cell phone or driving without a cell phone; inattentional blindness itself may be a risk factor for traffic accidents.