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In order to be able to use the aroma hand massage as a skill that can be done by a nurse who does not have a special aromatherapy technique, we examine anti-stress effects of simplified aroma hand massage for healthy subjects. We evaluated the anti-stress action of aroma hand massage and the different components of the procedure in 20 healthy women in their twenties. We used autonomic nervous function measured via electrocardiogram as an index of stress. After conducting a baseline electrocardiogram, we induced stress in the participants by asking them to spend 30 minutes completing Kraepelin's arithmetic test. We then administered various treatments and examined the anti-stress effects. Kraepelin's test significantly increased sympathetic nervous function and significantly reduced parasympathetic nervous function. Compared with massage without essential oil or aroma inhalation, aroma hand massage significantly increased parasympathetic nervous function and significantly decreased sympathetic nervous function. The effect of the aroma hand massage persisted when the procedure was simplified. The anti-stress action of the aroma hand massage indicates that it might have beneficial application as a nursing technique. There are several limitations in this study; ambiguities of low component/high component ratio of heart rate variability and bias by small subjects groups of the same women.

Image‐based localisation has been widely investigated in mobile robotics. However, traditional image‐based localisation approaches do not work when the environment appearance changes. The purpose of this paper is to propose a new system for image‐based localisation, which enables the approach to work also in highly dynamic environments.

The proposed technique is based on the use of a distributed vision system (DVS) composed of a set of cameras installed in the environment and of a camera mounted on a mobile robot. The localisation of the robot is achieved by comparing the current image grabbed by the robot with the images grabbed, at the same time, by the DVS. Finding the DVS's image, most similar to the robot's image, gives a topological localisation of the robot.

Experiments reported in the paper proved the system to be effective, even exploiting a pre‐existent DVS not designed for this application.

Whilst, aware that DVSs, as the one used in this work, are not diffuse nowadays, this work is significant because a novel idea is proposed for dealing with dynamic environments in the image‐based localisation approach and the idea is validated with experiments. Camera Sensor networks currently are an emerging technology and they may be introduced in several daily environments in the future.