Effectiveness of social behaviors for autonomous wheelchair robot to support elderly people in Japan.

We developed a wheelchair robot to support the movement of elderly people and specifically implemented two functions to enhance their intention to use it: speaking behavior to convey place/location related information and speed adjustment based on individual preferences. Our study examines how the evaluations of our wheelchair robot differ when compared with human caregivers and a conventional autonomous wheelchair without the two proposed functions in a moving support context. 28 senior citizens participated in the experiment to evaluate three different conditions. Our measurements consisted of questionnaire items and the coding of free-style interview results. Our experimental results revealed that elderly people evaluated our wheelchair robot higher than the wheelchair without the two functions and the human caregivers for some items.

[A case of hepatic actinomycosis diagnosed by thin needle aspiration biopsy successfully treated with antibiotics].

A 57-year-old man presented with chief complaints of right hypochondrial pain and fever. Laboratory tests revealed severe inflammatory reactions. Abdominal ultrasonography disclosed a mass with non-homogeneous internal echoes suggesting hepatic abscess. Percutaneous liver biopsy revealed a lump of actinomycetes, allowing a diagnosis of hepatic actinomycosis. The abscess disappeared following long-term treatment with penicillin antibiotics. Actinomycosis developing primarily in the liver is very rare. This condition needs to be distinguished from tumorous lesions of the liver, including malignancy. It seems noteworthy that the diagnosis of this condition was possible on the basis of percutaneous liver biopsy.