• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.21 no.11
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• pp.209-218
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• 2004

The purpose of this paper is to suggest a practical and simple method for the identification of the joint mechanical properties and to apply it to human knee joints. The passive moment at a joint was modeled by three mechanical parts, that is, a gravity term, a linear damper term and a nonlinear spring term. Passive pendulum tests were performed in 5 fat and 5 thin men. The data of pendulum test were used to identify the mechanical properties of joints through sequential quadratic programming (SQP) with random initial values. The identification was successful where the normalized root-mean-squared (RMS) errors between the simulated and experimental joint angle trajectories were less than 10％. The parameter values of mechanical properties obtained in this study agreed with literature. The inertia, gravity and the damping constant were greater at fat men, which indicates more resistance to body movement and more energy consumption fer fat men. The suggested method is noninvasive and requires simple setup and short measurement time. It is expected to be useful in the evaluation of joint pathologies.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.318-325
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• 2019

NREX, an upper limb exoskeleton robot, was developed at the National Rehabilitation Center to assist in the upper limb movements of subjects with weak muscular strength and control ability of the upper limbs, such as those with hemiplegia. For the free movement of the shoulder of the existing NREX, three passive joints were added, which improved its wearability. For the flexion/extension movement and internal/external rotation movement of the shoulder of the robot, the ball lock pin is used to fix or rotate the passive joint. The force and torque between a human and a robot were measured and analyzed in a reaching movement for four targets using a six-axis force/torque sensor for 20 able-bodied subjects. The addition of two passive joints to allow the user to rotate the shoulder can confirm that the average force of the upper limb must be 31.6% less and the torque must be 48.9% less to perform the movement related to the axis of rotation.

• Physical Therapy Korea
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.13-17
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• 2021

A normal range of motion is essential for performing activities of daily living. The capsular pattern is the proportional motion restriction in range of motion during passive exercises due to tightness of the joint capsule. Although the capsular pattern is widely referred to in clinical practice, there is no scientific evidence to support the concept. In this review, the appropriateness of the capsular pattern for evaluation of joint pathology was assessed. In the Textbook of Orthopaedic Medicine written by Cyriax, the capsular pattern did not specify how much reduction in angular motion is considered motion restriction. As the definition proposed initially was unclear, different methods have been used in previous studies investigating capsular pattern. In addition, the capsular pattern described all the major joints of the human body, but only the hip joint, knee joint, and shoulder joint were studied in experimental studies. Sensitivity and specificity were reported in one study and were meaningful in specific pathologies (loss of extension to loss of flexion). There was no consensus on the reliability and validity. In summary, the capsular pattern suggested by Cyriax or Kaltenborn is not supported or applies only to certain conditions. Various components around a joint complement each other and provide stability to the joint. It is recommended that the therapist perform multiple assessments rather than rely on a single assessment when evaluating joints.

• Anatomy and Cell Biology
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• v.56 no.2
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• pp.288-292
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• 2023

In the foot, the lumbricals flex the metatarsophalangeal joints and extend the interphalangeal joints. The lumbricals are known to be affected in neuropathies. It is not known whether they may degenerate in normal individuals. Here, we report our findings of isolated degenerated lumbricals in seemingly normal feet of two cadavers. We explored lumbricals in 20 male and 8 female cadavers that were 60-80 years of age at the time of death. As part of routine dissection, we exposed the tendons of the flexor digitorum longus and the lumbricals. From the degenerated lumbricals, we took some tissue for paraffin-embedding, sectioning, and staining by hematoxylin and eosin, and Masson's trichrome technique. Of the 224 lumbricals studied, we found four apparently degenerated lumbricals in two male cadavers. In the first, the 2nd and 4th lumbricals in the left foot and the 2nd in the right foot were degenerated. In the second, the right 4th lumbrical was degenerated. Microscopically, the degenerated tissue was made of bundles of collagen. The lumbricals may have degenerated due to compression of their nerve supply. We cannot comment on whether the functionality of the feet were affected by these isolated degeneration of the lumbricals.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.113-121
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• 2020

Human Pose Estimation (HPE) which localizes the human body joints becomes a high potential for high-level applications in the field of computer vision. The main challenges of HPE in real-time are occlusion, illumination change and diversity of pose appearance. The single RGB image is fed into HPE framework in order to reduce the computation cost by using depth-independent device such as a common camera, webcam, or phone cam. However, HPE based on the single RGB is not able to solve the above challenges due to inherent characteristics of color or texture. On the other hand, depth information which is fed into HPE framework and detects the human body parts in 3D coordinates can be usefully used to solve the above challenges. However, the depth information-based HPE requires the depth-dependent device which has space constraint and is cost consuming. Especially, the result of depth information-based HPE is less reliable due to the requirement of pose initialization and less stabilization of frame tracking. Therefore, this paper proposes a new method of HPE which is robust in estimating self-occlusion. There are many human parts which can be occluded by other body parts. However, this paper focuses only on head self-occlusion. The new method is a combination of the RGB image-based HPE framework and the depth information-based HPE framework. We evaluated the performance of the proposed method by COCO Object Keypoint Similarity library. By taking an advantage of RGB image-based HPE method and depth information-based HPE method, our HPE method based on RGB-D achieved the mAP of 0.903 and mAR of 0.938. It proved that our method outperforms the RGB-based HPE and the depth-based HPE.

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.11 no.12
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• pp.517-524
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• 2022

Human pose estimation is a method of estimating a posture by extracting a human joint key point. When occlusion occurs, the joint key point extraction performance is lowered because the human joint is covered. The occlusion phenomenon is largely divided into three types of actions: self-contained, covered by other objects, and covered by background. In this paper, we propose an effective posture estimation method using a masking phenomenon enhancement technique. Although the posture estimation method has been continuously studied, research on the occlusion phenomenon of the posture estimation method is relatively insufficient. To solve this problem, the author proposes a data augmentation technique that intentionally masks human joints. The experimental results in this paper show that the intentional use of the blocking phenomenon enhancement technique is strong against the blocking phenomenon and the performance is increased.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.42 no.1
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• pp.78-89
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• 2020

Human activity recognition (HAR) has become effective as a computer vision tool for video surveillance systems. In this paper, a novel biometric system that can detect human activities in 3D space is proposed. In order to implement HAR, joint angles obtained using an RGB-depth sensor are used as features. Because HAR is operated in the time domain, angle information is stored using the sliding kernel method. Haar-wavelet transform (HWT) is applied to preserve the information of the features before reducing the data dimension. Dimension reduction using an averaging algorithm is also applied to decrease the computational cost, which provides faster performance while maintaining high accuracy. Before the classification, a proposed thresholding method with inverse HWT is conducted to extract the final feature set. Finally, the K-nearest neighbor (k-NN) algorithm is used to recognize the activity with respect to the given data. The method compares favorably with the results using other machine learning algorithms.

• Transactions of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.10-18
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• 2003

This paper presented a design and control of a biped walking RGO(robotic gait orthosis) and its simulation. The biped walking RGO was distinguished from the other one by which had a very light-weight and a new RGO system will be made of 12-servo motors and 12-controllers. The vibration evaluation of the dynamic PLS(posterior leaf splint) on the biped walking RGO was used to access by the 3-axis accelerometer with a low frequency vibration of less than 30 Hz. The galt of the biped walking RGO depends on the constrains of mechanical kinematics and the initial posture. The stability of dynamic walking was investigated by analyzing the ZMP (zero moment point) of the biped walking RGO. It was designed according to the human wear type and was able to accomodate itself to the environments of S.C.I. Patients. The Joints of each leg were adopted with a good kinematic characteristics. To analyse joint kinematic properties. we made the strain stress analysis of the dynamic PLS and the analysis study of FEM with a dynamic PLS.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.50-57
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• 2019

This work presents a design and control method for a flexible robot arm operated by a wire drive that follows human gestures. When moving the robot arm to a desired position, the necessary wire moving length is calculated and the motors are rotated accordingly to the length. A robotic arm is composed of a total of two module-formed mechanism similar to real human motion. Two wires are used as a closed loop in one module, and universal joints are attached to each disk to create up, down, left, and right movements. In order to control the motor, the anti-windup PID was applied to limit the sudden change usually caused by accumulated error in the integral control term. In addition, master/slave communication protocol and operation program for linking 6 motors to MYO sensor and IMU sensor output were developed at the same time. This makes it possible to receive the image information of the camera attached to the robot arm and simultaneously send the control command to the robot at high speed.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.36 no.12
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• pp.996-1008
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• 2009

This paper proposes a novel approach for the model-based pose matching of a human body using Active Shape Models. To improve the processing time of model creation and registration, we use a skeleton-type model instead of the conventional silhouette-based models. The skeleton model defines feature information that is used to match the human pose. Images used to make the model are for 600 human bodies, and the model has 17 landmarks which indicate the body junction and key features of a human pose. When applying primary Active Shape Models to the skeleton-type model in the matching process, a problem may occur in the proximal joints of the arm and leg due to the color variations on a human body and the insufficient information for the fore-rear directions of profile normals. This problem is solved by using the background subtraction information of a body region in the input image and adding a 4-directions feature of the profile normal in the proximal parts of the arm and leg. In the matching process, the maximum iteration is less than 30 times. As a result, the execution time is quite fast, and was observed to be less than 0.03 sec in an experiment.