Abstract: An exercise assisting meter that enables the user to enjoy physical exercises and to perform a proper long-term management of exercises by enumerating the amount of repetitive exercises of the user and displaying the result of assessment on the exercises with an image information (character) of virtual organism representing different assessment grades. This meter manages the days of practice from the start of an exercise and makes the character evolve or grow as the days go on. Further, it increases or decreases a life-gauge for managing the healthy state of a character according to daily target achievement existence, and changes the figure (shape of body) of the character to a healthy, obese or sick form according to the life-gauge. Further, it includes a wellness meter for managing the wellness of the character according to the rate of target achievement on the previous day, and changes the expression and action of the character according to the wellness meter.

Abstract: The invention relates to an image coding/decoding method and to a recording medium on which a program for this method has been recorded, and the object thereof is to raise the compression rate of image data while the image data is maintained at a high quality. In FIG. 1(A), image data is divided into a plurality of pixel blocks, a DC image comprising mean values of respective ones of the blocks is generated, a corresponding block mean value is separated from each pixel block and a residual vector is obtained for every block. In a case where the magnitude of the residual vector is equal to or greater than an allowable value, orthogonal bases for approximating the residual vector by an adaptive orthogonal transformation that employs a nest of the DC image is obtained and coded. In FIG.