Global COE (Center
of Excellence) Program for Ars Vivendi at Ritsumeikan University
would like to give the greeting message. Ritsumeikan University is in
Kyoto, Japan. The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and
Technology Japan has granted Global COE Programs for distinguished
research centers, and our Research Center for Ars Vivendi was chosen
to be one of them in 2007.
Some of our graduate students had
ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis)
patients among their family members, and they are active in Japan ALS
Association and other ALS related movements. Some students continue
their research as they support ALS patients living independently in
Kyoto. Professor Tateiwa, the Leader of our Global COE Program,
researched on ALS and published ALS:
Immovable Body and Breathing Machine (Igak-Shoin) in 2004. In
this way, our Research Center for Ars Vivendi has been investigating
the life of ALS patients as one of our research topics, and the
program members have made presentations in various academic meetings
and have written various papers on ALS.
We aim, first, to
realize enough support system so that ALS patients can live
independently without relying on their family's care even after they
put on a ventilator. Second, we aim to support communication systems
with information technologies for those whose body movements are
limited. In addition to that, we aim to learn the situation of ALS
patients overseas and introduce them to Japanese people, or vice
versa, and publish our research results in many languages, so that
more people in the world can understand ALS and overcome their
difficulties. For example, we conducted our investigation in South
Korea last year, with the support of research team in University of
Tokyo.
Then, in February 2009, we held International Symposium "Research on Home
Care of Patients with ALS in East Asia", inviting ALS patients
and related people from South Korea, Mongolia, and Taiwan to our
university. Maybe some of the audience today joined us there, and we
thank you for your help at the time. Thanks to many people in various
countries, the symposium made a great success. The symposium was
broadcasted to the world on the Internet, and the reports and
presentation materials are available on our website (http://www.arsvi.com). Most of the
pages are still in Japanese, but we are trying to translate them into
English, Chinese, and other languages.
We would like to
continue our research on ALS in Japan, and also would like to learn
more about ALS situation in your countries. We appreciate any
information from you, and would like to cooperate with you in the
future. We will translate the information into as many languages as
we can and publish it on our website.
In closing, I'd like
to congratulate the success of this forum and thank you very
much.
June 20, 2009
Professor/ Program Leader of
Global COE Program Ars Vivendi,
Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto
Japan
Shin'ya Tateiwa