In this paper, we design and develop a sensor-embedded office chair that can measure the posture of the office worker continuously without disturbing their job. In our system, eight accelerometers, that are attached at the back side of the fabric surface of the chair, are used for recognizing the posture. We propose three sitting posture recognition algorithms by considering the initial position of the chair and the difference of physique. Through the experiment with 28 participants, we confirm that our proposed chair can recognize the sitting posture by 75.4% (algorithm 1), 83.7% (algorithm 2), and 85.6% (algorithm 3) respectively.

In this paper, we propose an algorithm to convert a given structured LOTOS specification into an equivalent flattened model called synchronous EFSMs. The synchronous EFSMs model is an execution model for communication protocols and distributed systems where each system consists of concurrent EFSMs and a finite set of multi-rendezvous indications among their subsets. The EFSMs can be derived from a specification in a sub-class of LOTOS and its implementation becomes simpler than the straightforward implementation of the original LOTOS specification because the synchronization among the processes in the model does not have any child-parent relationships, which can make the synchronization mechanism much more complex. Some experimental results are reported to show the advantage of synchronous EFSMs in terms of execution efficiency.

In LOTOS, requirements for a distributed system are described as a service definition. On the protocol level, each node (protocol entity) must exchange some data values and synchronization messages to provide a service described in a service definition. The tuple of the specifications of all nodes in the system which provide the service is called as a protocol specification. In order to develop the communication programs satisfying a given service definition, it is very important to develop the correct protocol specification. For this purpose, the simulation of protocol specifications is useful and it is desirable that the designer can observe how a protocol specification is executed in parallel and how synchronization messages are exchanged among the nodes. Therefore, we have developed a new tool named PROSPEX. For a given pair of a service definition and a protocol specification, it executes the protocol specification in parallel and shows its execution process graphically on X Window System. If the protocol specification executes an event sequence which does not satisfy the service definition, then PROSPEX informs it to the designer. In this paper, the design and usefulness of PROSPEX are described.

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) offer quick and easy network deployment in situations where it is not possible otherwise and they can be used to provide mobile users with a temporary infrastructure to use services in the absence of fixed infrastructure. Nodes in MANETs are free to move and organize themselves in an arbitrary fashion. The challenging task in such dynamic environments is how to improve the service availability. Replicating a service at some nodes distributed across the network is an effective strategy. However, service replication can considerably impact the system energy consumption. Since mobile devices have limited battery resources, a dynamic and efficient service replication is necessary to support such environments. In this paper, we propose a distributed service replication scheme for achieving high service availability with reasonable energy consumption for MANETs. The proposed method called HDAR (Highly Distributed Adaptive Service Replication) divides the whole network into disjoint zones of at most 2-hops in diameter and builds a dynamic replication mechanism which selects new replica zones depending on their service demand and the tradeoff between the communication and replication energy consumption costs. Through simulations, we confirmed that our approach can achieve higher service availability with reasonable energy consumption than existing methods.

In this paper, we propose a technique to synthesize a hardware circuit from a protocol specification consisting of several concurrent EFSMs with multi-rendezvous specified among their subsets. In our class, each multi-rendezvous can be specified among more than two EFSMs, and several multi-rendezvous can be specified for different combinations of EFSMs. In the proposed technique, using the information such as current states of EFSMs, input values at external gates and guard expressions, we compose a circuit to evaluate whether each multi-rendezvous can be executed. If several exclusive multi-rendezvous get executable simultaneously for some combinations of EFSMs, we select one of them according to the priority order given in advance. We compose such a circuit as a combinational logic circuit so that it works fast. By applying our technique to Abracadabra protocol specified in LOTOS, it is confirmed that the derived circuit handles multi-rendezvous efficiently.