The services expected from human-enhancing machines and applications are not limited to extending the motor, sensory, and cognitive abilities of individual people, or extending the skills and work performance of people using tools and machines, but also include communication, education, training, medical care, and nursing care based on a long-term understanding of the relationships between people and people, and between people and machines. The Applied Human Augmentation Project Research Center aims to develop not only support systems that improve the convenience of daily life based on research seeds related to the understanding, modeling, and application of human sensory-motor characteristics, but also human augmentation technologies that cover social systems that foster richer connections between people. Our mission is to implement these technologies in society in cooperation with other universities, companies, and public institutions.

The average life expectancy in Japan is said to be about 85 years, and it is estimated that 40% of the population will be elderly by 2030. The difference between the average life expectancy and the healthy life expectancy, which is an indicator that a person can live independently, is about 10 years. Many elderly people will need some kind of assistance during those 10 years. In order to cope with such a decline in physical functions, it is necessary to continue exercise habits and highly efficient training on one's own after completing rehabilitation treatment at medical institutions, but it is not easy to train independently at home. In addition, there are cases where it is difficult to physically go to the hospital due to geographical or physical factors. Therefore, we are working to realize a smart society that can enjoy a long and healthy life using AI technology through the development of data-driven rehabilitation support devices that use stealth sensing, automatic adjustment of training difficulty based on the understanding of physical skills, and soft actuators.

In order to understand the nature of body cognitive system transformation, it is necessary to create new fields such as the development of technology to intentionally cause body image and body diagram transformation, the development of technology to evaluate the level of consciousness of body image and body diagram, and the establishment of methodology to control the gap between body image and body diagram through the clarification of the influence of body transformation on the brain and its mechanism. It is also necessary to create a new field of study to establish a methodology to control the gap between body image and body schematic. We have named this field "BODY CONVERSION SCIENCE" and are challenging to design engineering interfaces that neutralize physicality, to verify the application of rehabilitation by changing body image, to develop technology to manipulate bodily self-consciousness and evaluate its level of consciousness, and to construct a theory related to the causal relationship between brain networks related to body conversion. In addition, we aim to develop our research into a cyclical practical cognitive medical engineering by closely cooperating with industry-academic research in the fields of psychology and cognitive neuroscience, which are targeted at sensory evaluation,medicine, and engineering.

Texture on the surface of an object can enhance the quality of feel of the object. With the increasing cost of physical prototyping in the corona society, the need for digital tools to minimize the cost is also increasing in texture design. In this activity, we will focus on the human haptic feeling, including tactile and force sensations. In this activity, we are working on understanding the mechanism of human haptic sensation, developing quantitative evaluation technology for haptic sensation, and developing tools to support the digital design of haptic sensation, as well as promoting and practicing haptic digital design.

Manufacturing with sensitivity leads to the creation of meaningful value for people. It is said that customer value is composed of total value = functional value + semantic value. People have a "model of sensitivity (KANSEI)" built within themselves based on their past experiences and learning, and unconsciously refer to this model of KANSEI when making a choice among various things to select something that suits them. Although each person's KANSEI is unique, it is possible to categorize it into several types by visualizing unconscious perception and understanding KANSEI. We believe that an interpreter is needed to connect KANSEI research and its social implementation in order to consistently understand KANSEI, visualize perception, and put it into practice across the entire spectrum from science to social implementation, and have launched the KANSEI Implementation Laboratory as a place to exchange and consolidate opinions. Through collaboration with companies in and outside the region, we aim to create products and semantic values based on KANSEI research.