• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
• /
• v.39 no.6
• /
• pp.617-624
• /
• 2015

This paper describes the development of a wearable robot to assist the elbow muscle for use by elderly workers in aging societies. Various previously developed wearable robots have drawbacks in terms of their price, portability, and slow recognition of the wearer's intention. In this paper, emphasis is placed on the following features to minimize these drawbacks. The first feature is that an actuator is attached only at the elbow joint that withstands the highest moment during arm motion to reduce the weight, volume, and price of the robot and increase its practicality. The second is that operation of the wearable robot is divided into two modes, a tracking mode and a muscle strengthening mode, and the robot can automatically switch between these modes by analyzing the wearer's intention through the brachial muscle strength measuring device developed in this study. The assistive performance of the developed wearable robot is experimentally verified by motion tracking experiments without an external load and muscle strengthening experiments with an external load. During the muscle strengthening experiments, the power of the muscle of the upper arm is measured by a commercial electromyography (EMG) sensor. Motion tracking performance at a speed of $120^{\circ}/s$ and muscle assistance of over 60 % were obtained using our robot.

• Journal of Computing Science and Engineering
• /
• v.6 no.1
• /
• pp.40-50
• /
• 2012

Increase in the number of older people due to demographic changes poses great challenges to the social healthcare systems both in the Western and as well as in the Eastern countries. Support for older people by formal care givers leads to enormous temporal and personal efforts. Therefore, one of the most important goals is to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of today's care. This can be achieved by the use of assistive technologies. These technologies are able to increase the safety of patients or to reduce the time needed for tasks that do not relate to direct interaction between the care giver and the patient. Motivated by this goal, this contribution focuses on applications of acoustic technologies to support users and care givers in ambient assisted living (AAL) scenarios. Acoustic sensors are small, unobtrusive and can be added to already existing care or living environments easily. The information gathered by the acoustic sensors can be analyzed to calculate the position of the user by localization and the context by detection and classification of acoustic events in the captured acoustic signal. By doing this, possibly dangerous situations like falls, screams or an increased amount of coughs can be detected and appropriate actions can be initialized by an intelligent autonomous system for the acoustic monitoring of older persons. The proposed system is able to reduce the false alarm rate compared to other existing and commercially available approaches that basically rely only on the acoustic level. This is due to the fact that it explicitly distinguishes between the various acoustic events and provides information on the type of emergency that has taken place. Furthermore, the position of the acoustic event can be determined as contextual information by the system that uses only the acoustic signal. By this, the position of the user is known even if she or he does not wear a localization device such as a radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag.

• Journal of Trauma and Injury
• /
• v.23 no.2
• /
• pp.163-169
• /
• 2010

Purpose: Spinal epidural hematoma (EDH) is a rare condition requiring an urgent diagnosis and management. We describe here the clinical features, magnetic resonance image (MRI) findings, and outcomes of surgery in six patients with spinal EDH. Methods: We retrospectively analyzed six patients who underwent surgery for spinal EDH between April 2004 and May 2010. Preoperative MRI findings within 48 hours of symptom occurrence were analyzed for cord compression, extent of EDH, and presence of vascular abnormalities. Pre- and postoperative neurological status was also assessed comparatively. Results: Our six patients consisted of three men and three women, with a mean age of 70 years (range: 54-88 years), who presented with the back pain or motor weakness. The mean follow-up period was 34 months (range: 2-72 months). Two patients had cardiovascular disease and were taking warfarin, but the others had no history of medical comorbidity. Those two patients taking warfarin had a history of trauma, another one experienced symptoms during a strenuous effort, and the others developed spontaneously. Before surgery, motor power was grade III in three patients, grade 0 in two patients, and normal in one patient. Preoperative MRI showed no vascular abnormalities except for the EDH in any patient. At the last follow-up, all those five patients with motor weakness showed neurological improvement compared to their preoperative status. There were no complications related to surgery. All six patients were able to ambulate with or without an assistive device. Conclusion: Spinal EDH can occur in patients without trauma, bleeding diathesis, or combined vascular pathology. The surgical outcomes of spinal EDH seem to be satisfactory, even in quadriplegic patients.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
• /
• v.15 no.5
• /
• pp.426-435
• /
• 2015

The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of an one-to-one fall prevention education on the falls and fall factors of adults who have had a stroke. 17 adults who have had a stroke were recruited and a total of four sessions of weekly one-to-one fall prevention educational program was developed considering the stroke population's cognitive abilities. Each sessions were composed of different fall-related subjects of introduction of fall, fall prevention exercise, fall prevention assistive device, and fall prevention environment modification. Dependent variables were the number of fall and fall danger in the recent month, balance ability, fear of falls, fall efficacy and depression. After four sessions of one-to-one fall prevention education, participants showed significantly positive changes in all dependent variables except for the balance ability(p<.05). An one-to-one fall prevention education to adults with stroke could decrease the number of fall and fall danger, fear of falls, depressive symptoms and fall efficacy. In order for the stroke adults to remain safely in their community and hospital, an one-to-one fall preventive education considering their cognitive level is needed.

• Journal of the Korea Convergence Society
• /
• v.8 no.9
• /
• pp.365-372
• /
• 2017

Squat exercise is one of the important free weight exercises that can safely and effectively expect the athletic performance by establishing the rationale. Therefore, it is necessary to study the side effects caused by incorrect exercise, scientific countermeasures and to develop a exercise estimation model. It is effective and accurate to use a variety of assistive devices to calibrate athletic posture. The issues of the structural analysis for designing a foot plate for squat exercise is to model the behavior by the dynamic behavior. It should be consider that the center of gravity of each segmented body is different when the maximum load is applied. It is applied to complete system design through simulation method with kinematic dynamic, ground reaction force and load analysis for the free weight exercise equipment, VR device, and safety foot plate. In this paper, the authors propose the design method for the vertical load distribution applied in the design of the foot plate used for the squat exercise mechanism, and based on these results, design make the more safe and reliable free weight exercise equipment system.

• Journal of Korean Foot and Ankle Society
• /
• v.22 no.3
• /
• pp.100-104
• /
• 2018

Purpose: An axillary crutch is the most commonly used assistive device in foot and ankle patients who require nonweightbearing. On the other hand, its use frequently induces axillary or wrist pain and critical neurovascular injuries have been reported in several studies. This study compared the clinical outcomes of patients using the knee walker and axillary crutch. Materials and Methods: A retrospective analysis was performed comparing the utility of a knee walker and axillary crutch as a nonweightbearing ambulatory aid for 62 foot and ankle patients treated between November 2016 and March 2018. A comparative study of the two orthosis could be performed because all the patients temporarily used an axillary crutch before or after the use of a knee walker. A demographic study and comparative analysis based on the visual analogue scale (VAS) satisfaction score (0~100), complications, and fall down history were evaluated. Furthermore, under the assumption of having retreatment, their preference of orthosis between the knee walker and axillary crutch was investigated. Results: The mean age of the patients was 36.5 and the mean duration of ambulation with a knee walker and axillary crutch were 5.2 and 2.4 weeks. The VAS satisfaction score of the knee walker and crutch was 88.8 and 27.5, respectively (p<0.05). The most frequent complications of the knee walker and crutch were ipsilateral knee pain (6 cases) and axillary or wrist pain (56 cases), respectively. No case of falling down occurred during knee walker ambulation, but there were two cases of crutch ambulation. Fifty-eight patients (93.5%) preferred the knee walker and four patients (6.5%) preferred a crutch. Conclusion: Compared to the axillary crutch, the knee walker afforded lower complication and higher satisfaction. Most patients preferred the knee walker to a crutch. Therefore, the knee walker is an efficient and safe orthosis for foot and ankle patients who require nonweightbearing.

• Journal of Internet of Things and Convergence
• /
• v.10 no.2
• /
• pp.69-75
• /
• 2024

This paper proposes an IoT-based indoor autonomous driving system that applies SLAM (Simultaneous Localization And Mapping) and Navigation techniques in a ROS (Robot Operating System) environment based on TurtleBot3. The proposed autonomous driving system can be applied to indoor autonomous wheelchairs and robots. In this study, the operation was verified by applying it to an indoor self-driving wheelchair. The proposed autonomous driving system provides two functions. First, indoor environment information is collected and stored, which allows the wheelchair to recognize obstacles. By performing navigation using the map created through this, the rider can move to the desired location through autonomous driving of the wheelchair. Second, it provides the ability to track and move a specific logo through image recognition using OpenCV. Through this, information services can be received from guides wearing uniforms with the organization's unique logo. The proposed system is expected to provide convenience to passengers by improving mobility, safety, and usability over existing wheelchairs.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
• /
• v.7 no.2
• /
• pp.145-149
• /
• 2013

Helical Tomotherapy is an innovative means of delivering intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) using a device that merges features of a linear accelerator and helical computed tomography (CT) scanner. Hereat, during helical tomotherapy process, megavoltage computed tomography (MVCT) image are usually used for guiding the precise set-up of patient before/after treatment delivery. But which would certainly increase the total dose for patients, this study was to investigate the imaging dose of MVCT using the cylindrical "Cheese" phantom on a tomotherapy machine. A set of cylindrical "Cheese" phantom was adopted for scanning with respectively pitch value (1, 2, 3 mm) with same number slice (10 slice), same length (approximately 9 cm) and phantom set-ups on the couch of tomotherapy system. The average MVCT imaging dose were measured using A1SL ion chamber inserted in the phantom with preset geometry. The MVCT scanning average dose for the cylindrical "Cheese" phantom was 2.24 cGy, 1.02 cGy, 0.81 cGy during respectively pitch value (pitch 1, 2, 3 mm) with same number slice (10 slice), and same length's average dose was 2.47 cGy, 1.28 cGy, 0.88 cGy respectively (pitch 1, 2, 3 mm). Two major parameters, the assigned pitch numbers and scanning length, where the most important impacts to the dose variation. The MVCT dose was inversely proportional to the CT pitch value. The results may provide a reliable guidance for proper planning design of the scanning region, which is valuable to help minimize the extra dose to patient. Questionnaires were distributed to Radiology departments at hospitals with 300 sickbeds throughout the Pohang region of North Gyeongsang Province concerning awareness and performance levels of infection control. The investigation included measurements of the pollution levels of imaging equipment and assistive apparatuses in order to prepare a plan for the activation of prevention and management of hospital infections. The survey was designed to question respondents in regards to personal data, infection management prevention education, and infection management guidelines.

• 한국노년학
• /
• v.37 no.2
• /
• pp.461-474
• /
• 2017

The purpose of this study was to develop the caregiver guideline for participation in activities daily living for the elderly with early dementia in home including easily adaptable and professional strategies as early intervetion. The process of this study was 3 stage. First stage, the development of preliminary caregiver guideline as the first stage of this study was to translate to Korean and reclassify the items about caregiver guideline for participation from reports of foreign association or government related dementia, and it consisted of 3 areas, 128 statements for questionnaire for Delphi investigation. Second stage, the guideline was to conduct the content validity, and delete, reclassify, integrate, revise inappropriate items through 2 rounds and 16 Delphi panels. Third stage, the establishment of the final version of caregiver guideline. It consisted of 8 areas: home modification and assistive device, home activities of daily living, health management, communication, psycho-emotional support, leisure activities, social participation, general strategies. All 68 items was arranged in important order. The content validity, stability, agreement index in this study were 0.81, 0.15, 0.79 respectively. When content validity, stability was above 0.49, below 0.5 in Delphi survey with 15 panels, it was not required additional survey. The result of this study meaned that it was not required to additional Delphi survey, and the result was stable and agreeable. This developed guideline was useful and practical to maintain the elderly's with dementia independent and healthy life as education materials for their caregivers, so it will expect to decrease caregiver's burden. Lastly, it stated limitation and suggestion for further study.

• Journal of Service Research and Studies
• /
• v.13 no.1
• /
• pp.186-200
• /
• 2023

This study aims to improve the usability of the white cane, which is walking equipment that most local visually impaired people use and carry when going out, and to contribute to the prevention of safety accidents and the walking rights of visually impaired people by providing improvement and resolution measures for the problems identified. Also, this study is a study on the visually impaired, primarily targeting the 1st to 2nd degree visually impaired people, who cannot go out on their own without walking equipment such as a white cane, corresponding to 20% among approximately 250,000 blind and low vision people in the Korean population. In the study process, the concept has been developed from the user's point of view in order that the white cane becomes a real help in the walking step of the visually impaired and the improvement of usability of the white cane, the main walking equipment for the visually impaired, are done by problem identification through the Double Diamond Model of Design Thinking (Empathize → Define → Ideate → Prototype → Test (verify)). As a result of the investigation in the process of Empathy, a total of five issues was synthesized, including an increase in the proportion of the visually impaired people, an insufficient workforce situation to help all the visually impaired, an improvement and advancement of assistive devices essential for the visually impaired, problems of damage, illegal occupation, demolition, maintenance about braille blocks, making braille block paradigms for the visually impaired and for everyone. In Ideate and Prototype steps, situations derived from brainstorming were grouped and the relationship were made through the KJ method, and specific situations and major causes were organized to establish the direction of the concept. The derived solutions and major functions are defined in four categories, and representative situations requiring solutions and major functions are organized into two user scenarios. Ideas were visualized by arranging the virtual Persona and Customer Journey Map according to the situation and producing a prototype through 3D modeling. Finally, in the evaluation, the final concept derived is a device such a smart cane for guidance for the visually impaired as ① a smart cane emphasizing portability + ② compatibility with other electronic devices + ③ a product with safety and convenience.