• Journal of rehabilitation welfare engineering & assistive technology
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.147-156
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• 2017

The white cane, walking assistive device of visually impaired person, has disadvantages for acquiring the information by contacting obstacles directly and detecting low obstacle on the ground. Recently, new devices have been developing to solve these problems, but these were not widely used due to high price and appearance. Therefore, in this study, we developed two types of walking assistive shoes which were manufactured with infrared sensors, pressure sensors and vibrating motors. Two types of shoes were classified with single sensor (SS) and double sensor (DS) type according to the number of infrared sensor. To evaluate the effectiveness, we compared required time and number of collisions during walking with walking assistive shoes and white cane on obstacle area. As the results, required time was increased than white cane while number of collisions was decreased when walking with developed walking assistive shoes. In addition, required time and number of collisions was more reduced when using walking assistive device than white cane. Therefore, we suggests that developed walking assistive shoes can a great help to provide safe walking condition and reducing time to adapt new types of walking assistive shoes.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.28 no.4D
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• pp.451-457
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• 2008

Establishing realistic bus service coverage is needed to build optimum city bus line networks and reasonable bus service coverage areas. The purposes of this study are understanding the characteristics of the present walking time and marginal walking time of small-medium cities and constructing an ANFIS (Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System) model to estimate the marginal walking time for certain age and income. The cities of Masan, Chongwon and Jinju are selected for study cities. The 80 percentile of present walking time of bus users of these cities are 10.2-11.1 minutes, thus the values are greater than the 5 minutes of the maximum walking time in USA and the marginal walking times of 21.1-21.8 minutes are much greater. An ANFIS model based on pulled data of the cities are constructed to estimate the marginal walking time of small-medium cities. Analyzing the relationship between marginal walking time and age/income by using the model, the marginal walking time decreases as the age increases, but is near constant from the age of 25 to 35. And the marginal walking time is inversely proportional to the income. In comparing the surveyed and the estimated values, as the statistics of coefficient of determination, MSE and MAE are 0.996, 0.163, 0.333 respectively, it may be judged that the explainability of the model is very high. The technique developed in this study can be applied to other cities.

• The Journal of Korean Physical Therapy
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• v.34 no.4
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• pp.161-167
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• 2022

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of regular training on the uneven surface that stroke patients encounter in their daily life on their ankle joint muscle activity and balance ability. They were divided into two groups: the gait training group on uneven surfaces and the gait training group on normal surfaces. Methods: In this study, 30 patients diagnosed with stroke and undergoing rehabilitation were selected. 15 people in the uneven surface gait training group and 15 people in the flat gait training group were selected. The muscle activation of the ankle muscles was measured when walking again on a even surface after walking on an uneven surface and on a flat ground. After each gait training, the limit of stability and Romberg test were performed to evaluate the balance ability. Results: As a result of the experimental results before and after walking by group, the tibialis anterior muscle activity of the paralyzed side was significantly decreased in the uneven surface walking group. As a result of measuring balance ability after training, the limit of stability in all directions was significantly increased in the uneven surface gait training group, and the area and length moved significantly decreased in the uneven surface gait training group in the Romberg test as well (p<0.05). Conclusion: After walking on uneven surface, it was confirmed that the muscle activity of the ankle joint decreased in normal flat walking, and thus the efficiency of muscle activity was increased. In addition, it was possible to confirm the improvement of the balance ability of the gait training on the uneven surface, and in conclusion, it could be confirmed that it had an effect on the improvement of the walking ability.

• Korean Journal of Applied Biomechanics
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.173-180
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• 2007

The purpose of study was to compare plantar pressure during walking wearing the curved rear balance and normal shoes. Twelve university students(height: $177.2{\pm}4.6cm$, weight: $68.4{\pm}5.8kg$, age: $26.2{\pm}1.6yrs.$) who have no known musculoskeletal disorders were recruited as the subjects. Plantar foot pressures were evaluated using the Tekscan's pressure measurement systems while subjects walked upright position wearing the curved rear balance and normal shoes in random order at a speed of 1.3 m/s. The contacting dimension, the mean plantar pressure, and the peak plantar pressure were determined for each trial. For each dependent variable, paired t-test was performed to test if significant difference existed between shoe conditions (p<.05). As a result, the curved rear balanced shoes showed as large as 38 up to 50 % of area at the rear side of feet than the normal shoes when measuring the contact area with upright position. In the distribution of average pressure, the curved rear balanced shoes displayed fairly low pressure compared to other normal shoes in general except for one area, which is M2, and especially, the measured pressures at the both rear (M1) and middle (M5) side of feet were low and statically significant. The contact area of the curved rear balanced shoes when walking was significantly larger at the rear (M1) and fore (M6, M7) side of feet. When considering pressure distribution at walking, low pressure was detected at the rear side of feet with the curved rear balanced shoes and at the fore side of feet for other normal shoes. The results showed that the contacting dimension of the curved rear balance shoes that acts between shoes and feet was higher than the corresponding value for the normal shoes in general; therefore it would reduce the pressure to the feet by allowing the each sole of the foot on the ground evenly.

• Journal of Korea Entertainment Industry Association
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• v.14 no.5
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• pp.267-276
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• 2020

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of physical activity in the elderly with osteoarthritis on stress and health-related quality of life (EQ-5D). This study performed data analysis using the SPSS 17.0 program in 104 elderly people with osteoarthritis over 65 years old using raw data from the 7th National Health and Nutrition Survey. The main results of this study are as follows: Males exercised more strength than women, and the better the subjective health status, the higher the rate of walking and aerobic activity. The group that felt stress showed a higher rate of walking and aerobic activity than the group that had no stress, and one group that felt a little stress practiced walking more than 3 days. The exercise ability of the elderly with osteoarthritis was better in the group who practiced walking, strength training, and aerobic activity than in the group without physical activity, and in self-management, the group practicing exercise and aerobic activity had problems with self-management. There was no daily activity, and the group that practiced walking and strength training also showed a high level of daily activity. In the area of pain/discomfort, the group practicing walking showed less pain/discomfort, and in the area of anxiety/depression, the group practicing walking showed less anxiety/depression. In conclusion, it is considered that in order to increase the quality of life of the elderly with osteoarthritis and to manage the stress, active efforts to increase the level of physical activity are necessary.

• Science of Emotion and Sensibility
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.441-448
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• 2010

In the aging society, the walking assist robot is a necessary device for being able to help the older and the lower limb disabled people to walk. In order to produce a convenient robot for the older and the lower limb disabled, it is needed for the research to detect the implicit walking intention and to control robot by a user's intention. This study is a previous study to develop the detection model of the walking intention and analyze the user's walking intention while a person is walking with Lofstrand crutches, by the combination of FSR and tilt signals. The FSR sensors attached user's the palm and the soles of foot are sensing force/pressure signals from these areas and are used for detecting the walking intention and states. The tilt sensor acquires roll and pitch signal from area of vertebrae lumbales and reflects the pose of the upper limb. We can recognize the user's walking intention such as 'start walking', 'start of right or left foot forward', and 'stop walking' by the combination of FSR and tilt signals can recognize.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.8 no.12
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• pp.1067-1075
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• 2002

The system error model for the compensation of the low-cost personal navigation system is derived and the error compensation method using GPS is also proposed. The walking navigation system (WNS) that calculates navigation information through walking detection has small error than INS, but the error also increases with time. In order to improve reliability of the system regardless of time, WNS is integrated with GPS. Since WNS is usually used in urban area, the blockage of CPS signal is frequently occurred. Therefore tightly coupled Kalman filter is used for the integration of WNS and GPS. In this paper, the system model for the design of tightly coupled Kかm filter is designed and measurement is linearized in consideration of moving distance error. It is shown by Monte Carlo simulation that the error is bounded even through the number of visible satellite is less than 4.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems Conference
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• 2003.09a
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• pp.531-534
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• 2003

In this paper, the Intelligent Space (iSpace) concept is applied for helping disabled or blind persons in crowded environments such as train stations, or airports. The main contribution of this paper is a general mathematical (fuzzy-neuro) description of obstacle avoidance method (walking habit) of moving objects (human beings) in a limited area scanned by the iSpace. A mobile robot with extended functions is introduced as a Mobile Assistant Robot which is assisted by the iSpace. The Mobile Assistant Robot (MAR) can guide and protect a blind person in a crowded environment with the help of the Intelligent Space. The prototype of the Mobile Assistant Robot and simulations of some basic types of obstacle avoidance method (walking habit) are presented.

• International Journal of Fuzzy Logic and Intelligent Systems
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.163-169
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• 2008

In this paper, we propose a real-time people tracking system with multiple CCD cameras for security inside the building. The camera is mounted from the ceiling of the laboratory so that the image data of the passing people are fully overlapped. The implemented system recognizes people movement along various directions. To track people even when their images are partially overlapped, the proposed system estimates and tracks a bounding box enclosing each person in the tracking region. The approximated convex hull of each individual in the tracking area is obtained to provide more accurate tracking information. To achieve this goal, we propose a method for 3D walking human tracking based on the IMPRESARIO framework incorporating cascaded classifiers into hypothesis evaluation. The efficiency of adaptive selection of cascaded classifiers have been also presented. We have shown the improvement of reliability for likelihood calculation by using cascaded classifiers. Experimental results show that the proposed method can smoothly and effectively detect and track walking humans through environments such as dense forests.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Landscape Architecture
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• v.47 no.1
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• pp.1-9
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• 2019

The objective of this study was to derive the served distance of the senior-friendly park considering physical changes, which were estimated through a comparison experiment at an actual target site. The time to walk 500m was examined because 500m is considered the served distance of a neighborhood park and as a standard set by the city. The mean walking time of the control group (younger than 65 years) was 536 seconds, while that of the treatment group (older than 65 years) was 889 seconds, which was approximately 1.7 times longer than the control group. The results of this study also showed that the walking time of females was longer than that of males when they were older than 65 years old. The walking velocities of the control group and the treatment groups were also calculated using the mean walking time. The weight estimated by a proportional formula was 0.6. When it was applied to 500m, which is the served distance of a neighborhood park, the served distance of the senior-friendly park was estimated as 300m. Lastly, the green service excluded area was quantified by applying the 300m, the served distance of a senior-friendly park, to the Jung-gu, Daegu, which had the highest elderly population in the Daegu Metropolitan City. The results of this calculation showed that the area served by a city park was $2,425,747m^2$ and the area excluded from the city park service was $4,627,700m^2$ for senior citizens. The results also showed that, in terms of the distributive equity, the administrative districts received unequal am ounts of urban green area services.