• Journal of the Korean Institute of Landscape Architecture
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• v.39 no.2
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• pp.65-72
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• 2011

Since walking and physical activity are critical for older adults to maintain their health, it is important to provide neighborhood environments which encourage their walking in daily life. The purposes of the present study were to investigate walking activity patterns of older people in an urban setting and to identify environmental correlates with walking of older adults. This study examined spatial and temporal patterns of physical activities, environmental barriers and motivations, satisfaction levels and demands on the physical environment. In-depth interviews with older adults over age sixty residing in Seoul metropolitan areas revealed that most respondents have a positive perception on walking in daily life, and many of them walk regularly for their health. A primary purpose of walking for older adults was exercise for health rather than transportation. The study result demonstrated that parks and trails were the most preferred places for walking by older adults, and there is an association between frequency of walking participation and access or convenience to parks, traffic safety, and street lights. Most respondents were concerned about traffic safety when they walk in their neighborhoods due to traffic speeds and unsafe streets. Lack of separate sidewalks or benches, stairs and slopes were barriers to older adults' walking habits. This data suggests that the promotion of walking behavior among older adults, some level of public health action, and community support are needed to ensure safe physical environments within communities.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.30 no.1D
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• pp.17-25
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• 2010

In Korea, the importance of walking has not been stood out in relief because of the rapid increase of a car on a drastic economic growth in the past half a century. Walking has failed to be recognized as a traffic measure or one of basic human rights. Therefore this study brings up problems of weakened walking right from increase of cars and examines reinforcing policies for walking right of advanced countries. And this study presents institutional devices for introducing walking safety measures of advanced countries reflecting pedestrian satisfaction and opinions about walking right. The results of this study are, First, pedestrians' walking liberty is guaranteed, Second, how to repair walking environment is searched and practical measures are analyzed to find out what is applicable to Korea, can reduce pedestrian accidents and is wanted by pedestrians using GAP analysis and Structural Equation. Third, basic data for upcoming selection of policies are presented by analyzing pedestrian satisfaction assuming that selected measures are operated.

• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.12 no.6
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• pp.358-366
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• 2006

This paper describes a novel navigation algorithm using a locomotion interface with two 6-DOF programmable foot platforms. When a human walks on the locomotion interface (LI), the walking motions of the human are recognized by several sensors. Then, the sensed information is used by the LI for generation of infinite surfaces for continuous walking and the virtual environments for scene update according to motions of the human walking. The suggested novel navigation system can induce user's real walking and generate realistic visual feedback during navigation. A novel navigation algorithm is suggested to allow natural navigation in virtual environments by utilizing conditions of normal gait analysis. For realistic visual feedback, the virtual environment is designed with three components; 3D object modeler for buildings and terrains, scene manager and communication manager component. From experiments, the subjects were satisfied with the reality of the suggested navigation algorithm using the locomotion interface. Therefore, the suggested navigation system can allow a user to explore into various virtual terrains with real walking and realistic visual feedback.

• Korean Journal of Applied Biomechanics
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.35-43
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• 2017

Objective: The purpose of this study was to determine how gaze angle affects muscle activity and kinematic variables during treadmill walking and to offer scientific information for effective and safe treadmill training environment. Method: Ten male subjects who have no musculoskeletal disorder were recruited. Eight pairs of surface electrodes were attached to the right side of the body to monitor the upper trapezius (UT), rectus abdominis (RA), erector spinae (ES), rectus femoris (RF), bicep femoris (BF), tibialis anterior (TA), medialis gastrocnemius (MG), and lateral gastrocnemius (LG). Two digital camcorders were used to obtain 3-D kinematics of the lower extremity. Each subject walked on a treadmill with a TV monitor at three different heights (eye level; EL, 20% above eye level; AE, 20% below eye level; BE) at speed of 5.0 km/h. For each trial being analyzed, five critical instants and four phases were identified from the video recording. For each dependent variable, one-way ANOVA with repeated measures was used to determine whether there were significant differences among three different conditions (p<.05). When a significant difference was found, post hoc analyses were performed using the contrast procedure. Results: This study found that average and peak IEMG values for EL were generally smaller than the corresponding values for AE and BE but the differences were not statically significant. There were also no significant changes in kinematic variables among three different gaze angles. Conclusion: Based on the results of this study, gaze angle does not affect muscle activity and kinematic variables during treadmill walking. However, it is interesting to note that walking with BE may increase the muscle activity of the trapezius and the lower extremity. Moreover, it may hinder proper dorsiflexion during landing phase. Thus, it seems to reasonable to suggest that inappropriate gaze angle should be avoided in treadmill walking. It is obvious that increased walking speed may cause a significant changes in biomechanical parameters used in this study. It is recommended that future studies be conducted which are similar to the present investigation but using different walking speed.

• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.879-888
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• 2013

This paper addresses the vision based local path planning system for obstacle avoidance. To handle the obstacles which exist beyond the field of view (FOV), we propose a Panoramic Environment Map (PEM) using the MDGHM-SIFT algorithm. Moreover, we propose a Complexity Measure (CM) and Fuzzy logic-based Avoidance Motion Selection (FAMS) system to enable a humanoid robot to automatically decide its own direction and walking motion when avoiding an obstacle. The CM provides automation in deciding the direction of avoidance, whereas the FAMS system chooses the avoidance path and walking motion, based on environment conditions such as the size of the obstacle and the available space around it. The proposed system was applied to a humanoid robot that we designed. The results of the experiment show that the proposed method can be effectively applied to decide the avoidance direction and the walking motion of a humanoid robot.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.19 no.8
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• pp.230-238
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• 2018

The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of park type and inner elements of parks on the number of walking days of walking out of Ulsan Metropolitan City, And to make policy suggestions for them. The elderly people aged 65 and 1,274 persons or over in Ulsan Metropolitan City were selected as the subjects using the raw data of the 2015 community health survey. A multilevel analysis was conducted using a hierarchical linear model to find out the factors affecting the number of days of walking according to the level of regional level factor according to the five wards of Ulsan Metropolitan City. The number of walking days increased with the number of sports facilities and the number of walking days decreased with the number of amusement facilities mainly used by children. In the case of Jung-gu in Ulsan, the number of walking days was low even though the number of parks and the area of the park were large, In the case of Buk-gu, the number of walking was high even though the number of parks and the area of the park were small. Elderly people in Jung - gu, Ulsan metropolitan city are expected to need a health promotion project to promote walking, and it is necessary for seniors in Buk - gu, Ulsan Metropolitan City to make a good walking environment.

• 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.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.7 no.11
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• pp.2690-2701
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• 2013

Humans are able to recognize small number of people they know well by the way they walk. This ability represents basic motivation for using human gait as the means for biometric identification. Such biometric can be captured at public places from a distance without subject's collaboration, awareness or even consent. Although current approaches give encouraging results, we are still far from effective use in practical applications. In general, methods set various constraints to circumvent the influence factors like changes of view, walking speed, capture environment, clothing, footwear, object carrying, that have negative impact on recognition results. In this paper we investigate the influence of walking speed variation to different visual based gait recognition approaches and propose normalization based on geometric transformations, which mitigates its influence on recognition results. With the evaluation on MoBo gait dataset we demonstrate the benefits of using such normalization in combination with different types of gait recognition approaches.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.56-62
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• 2011

Terrain recognition ability is crucial to the performance of legged robots in an outdoor environment. For instance, a robot will not easily walk and it will tumble or deviate from its path if there is no information on whether the walking surface is flat, rugged, tough, and slippery. In this study, the ground surface recognition ability of robots is discussed, and to enable walking robots to recognize the surface state and changes, a central moment method was used. The values of the sensor signals (load cell) of robots while walking were detected in the supported section and were analyzed according to signal variance, skewness, and kurtosis. Based on the results of such analysis, the surface state was detected and classified.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.2 no.4
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• pp.310-316
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• 2007

The paper proposes a human-following behavior of mobile robot and an intelligent space (ISpace) is used in order to achieve these goals. An ISpace is a 3-D environment in which many sensors and intelligent devices are distributed. Mobile robots exist in this space as physical agents providing humans with services. A mobile robot is controlled to track a walking human using distributed intelligent sensors as stably and precisely as possible. The moving objects is assumed to be a point-object and projected onto an image plane to form a geometrical constraint equation that provides position data of the object based on the kinematics of the intelligent space. Uncertainties in the position estimation caused by the point-object assumption are compensated using the Kalman filter. To generate the shortest time trajectory to track the walking human, the linear and angular velocities are estimated and utilized. The computer simulation and experimental results of estimating and trackinging of the walking human with the mobile robot are presented.