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To improve the quality of childcare in nursery schools by using information technologies, a childcare assisting system is proposed to help the teachers with their daily works. The first step of the system is automatically monitoring and analyzing the behaviors of the children. In this paper, a multiple children identification and tracking method is proposed by using color and depth information from the sensors setting in the environment. The children are identified by integrating multiple personal information of color, face, moving pattern, and the identification results are used as the observation likelihoods in the particle filter based tracking process. The proposed method can continuously track multiple children under complex environment with occlusions among children and fast motions crossing with each other. The effectiveness of the proposed method is proven by the experiments conducted in a nursery school.

The objective of this study was to evaluate the gene expression of four bone-related adhesive proteins during the early healing of bone defect and bone-implant interface in animal experiments. T-shaped hollow pure titanium implants with dual acid-etched surfaces were placed into femurs of 17 Sprague-Dawley rats, and bone defects with the same size were made in the same site in 15 rats. Newly formed bone was harvested at 5 days, 8 days and 16 days respectively. The gene expression of fibronectin (FN), collagen I (COL I), bone sialoprotein II (BSP II) and osteopontin (OPN) in non-implant and bone-implant defects were examined using semi-quantity reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction. The gene expression of OPN in the non-implant defect was slightly higher than that in the bone-implant interface. At 8 days postoperation, FN, COL I and BSP II expression were significantly up-regulated in the bone-implant group. All four proteins peaked at 8 days. The results indicate that the gene expression of the four adhesive proteins is different between bone defect and bone-implant interface. Intracellular synthesis of FN, COL I and BSP II was accelerated in the early healing stages of the bone-implant interface.

This paper largely presents a deadlock prevention policy for automated flexible manufacturing systems. Based on Petri nets and some investigations on siphons, this policy is targeted at one modeled manufacturing system extended from system of simple sequential process. Given a net, elementary and dependent siphons can be obtained from the strict minimal siphons. Our deadlock control method is an iterative one by adding two kinds of control places called ordinary control place and weighted control place to the original net to prevent elementary siphons from being unmarked, under some conditions the dependent siphons can be prevented from being emptied as well. Finally, a flexible manufacturing example is presented to illustrate our deadlock prevention policy.