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Recently, a robot mediated therapy was given attention in support of the education and rehabilitation of children with autism. In this paper, we design and develop a robot assisted test-bed system, which provides efficient observations and analysis methods for children with autism during a free play session with robots. The test-bed system consists of a portable handheld device and a remote server. The handheld device helps a therapist to input and analyze observed results of children΄s play, and the remote server stores recorded video and audio information using a database program. For the robot platforms for proposed test-bed system, we use animal-type devices, which are familiar and effective for children with autism. The observed interaction between the robot and children is transmitted in real-time to the remote server. Thereafter, if it is needed, this system can provide the therapist with analyzed monitoring information for further educational treatments. For the actual service trial of the proposed system, we have implemented a specialized kindergarten for children with autism and performed several experiments. Results show that the proposed test-bed system provides not only easy and quantitative observation methods, but also efficient analyses for monitoring positive interactions between children with autism and robot systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the advent of the postgenomic era, accurate and fast nucleic analyses are becoming more important with reasonable running costs. Nucleic acids carry precious information important for the understanding of many complex biological processes critical for diagnosis and therapy of a wide range of diseases. This information is also instrumental in the classification of organisms. Recent developments in microfluidics provide a new methodology with unprecedented sensitivity for mRNA isolation from single mammalian cells and genomic DNA processing of multiple bacterial cells. In this chapter, nucleic acid analyses on microfluidic chips with particular emphasis on parallel matrix architecture, which will soon play an important role in applications of microfluidics on the development of proteomics and functional genomics, will be discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]