Initiative for Life Design Innovation (iLDi)

Future School Support Project

The Future School Support Project consists of two sub-projects: “Research on the creation of intelligent infrastructure to detect warning signs of ‘Hikikomori’ and its improvement” and “Research on support for education and lives of students”.

Intelligent infrastructure for more reliable detection of early warning signs of ‘Hikikomori’

We aim to create technologies to improve the detection of the warning signs of pre-Hikikomori (i.e. acute social withdrawal) conditions. We employ advanced sensor technologies to automatically collect (consenting) students’ PLR, including lifestyle and sleep hours. In cooperation with specialists and counselors at Osaka University Campus Life Health and Counselling Center (Health Center), we plan to build a system that can, based on data collected about users’ daily use of SNS, smart watches, and AI assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa, directly receive advice from clinical psychologists and specialists about ways to improve their lifestyle.

Research on education support and student life support

We research methods to resolve issues related to large-classroom lectures by building a new e-learning system. Typical university education involves large classrooms, which makes it difficult for lecturers to grasp the level of comprehension of individual students or the class as a whole. Because students hesitate to ask questions in front of other students, their issues are often not addressed, which leads to difficulty keeping up with lectures.

In order to resolve issues in large-classroom lectures, this research strives to propose an innovative education method by building a new e-learning system. This system will address communication problems in one-to-many type lectures, and will be able to follow up with each student individually despite their diverse levels of knowledge and understanding etc.