• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.99-106
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• 2017

Audible Pedestrian Signal(APS) is an additional equipment to provide information about pedestrian signals in non-visual formats such as audible tones and verbal messages. It can provide information to pedestrians about the location and directions of a crosswalk, and the traffic signal status. In general, a pedestrian who is visually impaired uses a 358.5MHz wireless remote controller to activate the APS and crosses at the crosswalk with the help of the APS. The existing APS can only receive an activation message from the remote controller. Therefore, the APS has an issue, especially at intersections, that all APSs within the communication range of the remote controller are activated simultaneously. It makes to confuse the visual impaired pedestrians. In this paper, we propose a BLE-enabled APS that can enable two-way communication via Bluetooth with a smartphone. The proposed system solves the problem and provides them with additional information, so that visually impaired pedestrians can cross at the crosswalk more conveniently.

• PNF and Movement
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.261-267
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• 2021

Purpose: This study aimed to investigate changes in gait variables depending on whether a task was performed using a smartphone while walking on a ramp. Methods: The participants of this study were 41 college students attending U University located in Gyeongju City, Gyeongsangbuk-do. In this study, gait variables were measured during ramp gait while using a smartphone to perform a task and during ramp gait without performing such tasks. In other words, four walking conditions were used: 1) walking up a ramp, 2) walking up a ramp while using a smartphone to perform a task, 3) walking down a ramp, and 4) walking down a ramp while using a smart phone to perform a task. Gait variables were measured using a gait analysis tool (Legsys; BioSensics, USA), and stride time, stride length, stride velocity, cadence, and double support were analyzed. The order of measurements was randomized to control for order effects due to repeated measurements. Results: The comparative analysis of gait variables according to the presence or absence of smartphone use during ramp gait showed that there were significant differences in stride time, stride length, and stride velocity during both ramp ascent and ramp descent (p < 0.05). In both ramp ascent and ramp descent, stride time increased when walking using a smartphone, compared to when walking without using a smartphone (p < 0.05). However, in both ramp ascent and ramp descent, stride length and stride velocity were decreased when walking using a smartphone compared to when walking without using a smartphone (p < 0.05). Conclusion: The study results showed that the use of a smartphone during walking can affect safety. Therefore, it is necessary to improve the awareness of risks associated with walking while using a smartphone, and further research needs to be conducted in various environments and with different ramps.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.37 no.1
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• pp.203-215
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• 2017

Recently, interest in Pedestrian Navigation Service (PNS) is being increased due to the diffusion of smart phone and the improvement of location determination technology and it is efficient to use landmarks in route guidance for pedestrians due to the characteristics of pedestrians' movement and success rate of path finding. Accordingly, researches on extracting landmarks have been progressed. However, preceding researches have a limit that they only considered the difference between buildings and did not consider visual attention of maps in display of PNS. This study improves this problem by defining building attributes as local variable and global variable. Local variables reflect the saliency of buildings by representing the difference between buildings and global variables reflects the visual attention by representing the inherent characteristics of buildings. Also, this study considers the connectivity of network and solves the overlapping problem of landmark candidate groups by network voronoi diagram. To extract landmarks, we defined building attribute data based on preceding researches. Next, we selected a choice point for pedestrians in pedestrian network data, and determined landmark candidate groups at each choice point. Building attribute data were calculated in the extracted landmark candidate groups and finally landmarks were extracted by principal component analysis. We applied the proposed method to a part of Gwanak-gu, Seoul and this study evaluated the extracted landmarks by making a comparison with labels and landmarks used by portal sites such as the NAVER and the DAUM. In conclusion, 132 landmarks (60.3%) among 219 landmarks of the NAVER and the DAUM were extracted by the proposed method and we confirmed that 228 landmarks which there are not labels or landmarks in the NAVER and the DAUM were helpful to determine a change of direction in path finding of local level.