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Health problems related to back posture are an increasingly common issue in modern societies. Thanks to the advances of current IT technology, various solutions are also becoming widespread. However, despite the advantages and promising features of these technologies, only a few solutions concern how to visualize and use the data sensed by those technologies. In this paper, we designed and developed an application that uses the data calculated from the upper back posture of the user. Moreover, we enriched the user experience through various games with deeper game dynamics than those in previous applications. In this work, we show how a game can support users in preventing back-related posture problems and show in detail the game dynamics we developed.

Wrist worn wearable computing devices are ideally suited for presenting notifications through haptic stimuli as they are always in direct contact with the user's skin. While prior work has explored the feasibility of haptic notifications, we highlight a lack of empirical studies on thermal and pressure feedback in the context of wearable devices. This paper introduces prototypes for thermal and pressure (squeeze) feedback on the wrist. It then presents a study characterizing recognition performance with thermal and pressure cues against baseline performance with vibrations.

In this study, we explore how our smart maternity clothes can affect the parent's emotional attachment to the fetus. The smart maternity clothes have two primary functions - visualization of the fetal movements and provision of the statistical data on the movements to the user's smartphone via Bluetooth. We conducted a small-sized pilot study with 4 married couples at 28-32 weeks of pregnancy, and the participants' self-reported empathic level with the fetus was increased overall. Particularly, between the two functions of our smart clothes, the female (i.e., mother) participants showed a tendency of preferring provision of informative data, whereas the male (i.e., father) participants preferred the visual stimuli.

In this paper, an area efficient VLSI architecture of decision feedback equalizer is derived accommodating 64/256 QAM modulators. This architecture is implemented efficiently in reusable VLSI structure using EDA tool due to its regular structure. The main idea is to employ a time-multiplexed design scheme grouping the adjacent filter taps with correlated internal dataflow and with data transfer having same processing sequence between blocks. We simulated the proposed design scheme using SYNOPSYSTM and SPWTM. Index Terms - Decision feedback equalizer, QAM, reusable VLSI implementation, FIR filter.

We introduce a new approach for optimizing clock tree, especially for high-speed circuits. Our approach provides a useful guideline to a designer; by user-specified parameters, design favors will be satisfied. Three of these tradeoffs will be provided in this paper. 1) First, to provide a "good" tradeoff between skew and wirelength, a new clock tree routing scheme is proposed. The technique is based on a combination of hierarchical bottom-up geometric matching and minimum rectilinear Steiner tree. 2) When a clock tree construction scheme is used for high-speed clock distribution in the transmission line mode (e.g., Multi-Chip Modules), to ensure correct operation, there are several physical constraints [2]. One of the crucial problems is, given a clock net topology with hierarchical buffering, how to redistribute the buffers evenly over the routing plane avoiding congestion, at the expense of wirelength increase. Given a special emphasis to clock buffer redistribution in this paper, our experiments show that on the average congestion is improved by 20% at the cost of a 10% wirelength increase. 3) Finally, a postprocessing step offering a tradeoff between skew and phase-delay is proposed, based on a combination of hierarchical bottom-up geometric matching and bounded radius minimum spanning tree. Previous clock skew minimization techniques did not address those issues simultaneously.