• Physical Therapy Rehabilitation Science
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.517-525
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• 2022

Objective: The rehabilitation protocols for functional recovery have been emphasized after total knee arthroplasty, and Pilates is in the spotlight as a safe and easily modified exercise method. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of mat Pilates exercise on lower extremity function, postural balance, and walking in the individuals with total knee arthroplasty. Design: One group pretest-posttest design. Methods: Eighteen older women with unilateral total knee arthroplasty was recruited in the study. The subjects were evaluated on lower extremity function, postural balance, and walking before and after mat Pilates exercise. All subject performed one hour mat Pilates exercise, 3 times a week for 8 weeks. Mat Pilates exercises were focused on core stability and lower extremity strengthening and, more dynamic movements were added to increase the difficulty of movements every two weeks. The lower extremity function was measured using the Western Ontario and McMaster Osteoarthritis Index (WOMAC), knee joint position sense, and five times sit-to-stand test. Postural balance was assessed by single leg stance test, functional reach test, and timed up and go test. Walking was measured by OptoGait system to temporospatial parameter. Results: The lower extremity function, postural balance, and walking were significantly improved after mat Pilates exercise, except for five times sit-to-stand test (p<0.05). Conclusions: This study demonstrated that the mat Pilates exercise was a useful method to improve lower extremity function, postural balance, and walking in the older women with unilateral total knee arthroplasty.

• Journal of the Institute of Convergence Signal Processing
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.113-118
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• 2012

Most of the existing multiped walking robots are biomimetic, i.e. they are designed to have the shapes of living things such as animals or insects. Even though those robots are familiar to us, they have some drawbacks in the view point of walking efficiency such as stability and walking speed. In this paper, we introduce a quadruped walking robot that can perform fast and stable walking by virtue of its distinctive leg positions. The proposed quadruped robot has a foreleg, a hindleg, a left leg, and a right leg. In the conventional robots, dynamic walking is needed to increase walking speed. Dynamic walking is difficult to be accomplished and is apt to be unstable. The proposed robot can move its legs in a manner that its center of gravity is always laid in the supporting polygon, so it can perform fast and stable walking without dynamic walking.

• Journal of rehabilitation welfare engineering & assistive technology
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.301-308
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• 2015

The purpose of this study was to compare core muscle activity and thickness in the abdomen (internal Oblique, IO; External Oblique, EO; Transverse Abdominis, TrA) according to walking training methods. Tests were performed on 20 healthy men who randomly assigned to two groups, divided by Nordic walking (n=10) or Power walking group (n=10). They were performed Nordic walking or Power walking training for 2 weeks that is consistent with each of the assigned groups. Results demonstrated that Nordic walking was more effective than Power walking in improving IO and EO activities. Nordic walking is believed to be useful method for a variety of therapeutic exercise as a stable balance with the stick in addition to normal gait and trunk stability.

• Korean Journal of Applied Biomechanics
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.27-36
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• 2007

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of the upper body in order to increase a propulsive force in the old's walking. The subjects were each 10 males, the latter term of the aged and former term of the aged. There were three walking speeds of slow(about 5km/h), medium(about 6km/h), and maximum speed(about 7km/h). The subjects walking 11m were filmed the 5m section (from 3m to 8m) by 2-video cameras using three dimensional cinematography. And we computed different mechanical quantities and especially computed the relative momentum in order to achieve this study's aim. In this study, we was able to acquire some knowledge. The step length and step frequency increased in proportion to the walking speed, and the faster walking speed, the shorter ratio of supporting time( both legs supporting time/one step length time). When it was one leg support phase, the torso was indicated to generate the momentum in order to produce the propulsive force of walking. The upper and lower body had a cooperative relation for walking such as keeping step rate with the arms to legs and maintaining the body balance. The opposition phase for upward-and-downward direction of the torso and arms in walking was functioned to prevent the increase rapidly toward vertical direction of the center of gravity. The arms had contributed to coordinate the tempo of legs and the posture maintenance of the upper body. And by absorbing the relative momentum from the upper torso with arms to the lower torso, it had the rhythmical movement on upward-and-downward direction reducing the vertical reaction force. On account of the relations of absorption and generation of the propulsive force and the production of vertical impulse in the lower torso when walking by maximum speed, it was showed that the function of lower torso was come up as important problem for the mechanical posture stability and propulsive force coordination.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.92-103
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• 2013

Humanoid robot is the most intimate robot platform suitable for human interaction and services. Biped walking is its basic locomotion method, which is performed with combination of joint actuator's rotations in the lower extremity. The present work employs humanoid robot simulator and numerical optimization method to generate optimal joint trajectories for biped walking. The simulator is developed with Matlab based on the robot structure constructed with the Denavit-Hartenberg (DH) convention. Particle swarm optimization method minimizes the cost function for biped walking associated with performance index such as altitude trajectory of clearance foot and stability index concerning zero moment point (ZMP) trajectory. In this paper, instead of checking whether ZMP's position is inside the stable region or not, reference ZMP trajectory is approximately configured with feature points by which piece-wise linear trajectory can be drawn, and difference of reference ZMP and actual one at each sampling time is added to the cost function. The optimized joint trajectories realize three phases of stable gait including initial, periodic, and final steps. For validation of the proposed approach, a small-sized humanoid robot named DARwIn-OP is commanded to walk with the optimized joint trajectories, and the walking result is successful.

• Proceeding of EDISON Challenge
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• 2016.03a
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• pp.493-497
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• 2016

Walking mechanism, there are many types. Prior to the modeling and design, we thought about a variety of mechanisms based on the Janssen mechanism to design a walking mechanism optimized for walking. The more the legs increases the stability of the structure, while the weight is heavy and if that advantage had the disadvantage, the legs are easier to walk in the utilization and structural aspects of the torque had fewer advantages. The disadvantage is that the instability mechanism, four-legged, but improve it and look forward to the idea of utilization and cost-effectiveness, its future utilization will be endless. To study this, we utilized a variety of software, such as m-sketch, Edison design program, we have seen the actual production through scientific experiments box.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.58 no.3
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• pp.614-620
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• 2009

The force distribution in multi-legged robots is a constrained, optimization problem. The solution to the problem is the set points of the leg contact forces for a particular system task. In this paper, an efficient and general formulation of the force distribution problem is developed using linear programming. The considered walking robot is a quadruped robot with a locked-joint failure, i.e., a joint of the failed leg is locked at a known place. For overcoming the drawback of marginal stability in fault-tolerant gaits, we define safety margin on friction constraints as the objective function to be maximized. Dynamic features of locked-joint failure are represented by equality and inequality constraints of linear programming. Unlike the former study, our result can be applied to various forms of walking such as crab and turning gaits. Simulation results show the validity of the proposed scheme.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2000.11a
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• pp.743-747
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• 2000

The coordinated mechanism of terrestrial vertebrates enables them to maneuver over all of the terrain conditions since they have a distinct ability to adapt to varying conditions. Their locomotions remain infinitely more advanced and elegant than that of present-day existing mechanical walking robots. However, the principles of existing walking robots are based more on technical rather than on biological concepts, yielding unstable locomotion with low speed. In order to apply these advanced biological phenomena to the mechanical design of 4-legged walking robot, modeling methods are introduced and mathematical equations are also introduced.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.31 no.8
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• pp.889-895
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• 2007

Quantifying dynamic stability is important to assessment of falling risk or functional recovery for leg injured people. Human locomotion is complex and known to exhibit nonlinear dynamical behaviors. The purpose of this study is to quantify major joints of the body using chaos analysis during walking. Time series of the chaotic signals show how gait patterns change over time. The gait experiments were carried out for ten young males walking on a motorized treadmill. Joint motions were captured using eight video cameras, and then three dimensional kinematics of the neck and the upper and lower extremities were computed by KWON 3D motion analysis software. The correlation dimension and the largest Lyapunov exponent were calculated from the time series to quantify stabilities of the joints. This study presents a data set of nonlinear dynamic characteristics for eleven joints engaged in normal level walking.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.28 no.4
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• pp.446-454
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• 2011

In terms of the anatomy and mechanics of the human foot, a flexible robot foot with toes and heel joints is designed for a bipedal walking robot. We suggest three design considerations in determining foot design parameters which are critical for walking stability. Those include the position of the frontal toe, the stiffness of toes and heels, and the position of the ankle joint. Compared with the conventional foot with flat sale, the proposed foot is advantageous for human-like walking due to the inherent structural flexibility and the reasonable parameter values. Simulation results are provided to determine the design parameters and also show that the proposed foot enables smaller energy consumption.