• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.21 no.6
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• pp.553-559
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• 2015

The purpose of this research is to develop a gait assistive device to enhance the gait stability and training efficiency of stroke patients. The configuration of this device is mainly composed of a motored wheel and a single cane whose lower end is attached to a motored wheel frame. A patient can feel haptic information from continuous ground contact from the wheel while walking through the grip handle. In addition, the wheeled cane can avoid using excessive use of the patient's upper limb for weight support and motivate the patient to use a paralyzed lower limb more actively. Moreover, the proposed device can provide intuitive and safe user interaction by integrating a force sensor and a tilt sensor equipped to the cane frame, and a switch sensor at the cane's handle. The admittance control has been implemented for the patient to change the walking speed intuitively by using the interaction forces at the handle. A hemi-paretic stroke patient participated in the walking assistive experiments as a pilot study to verify the effectiveness of the proposed haptic cane system. The results showed that the patient could improve walking speed and muscle activations during walking with a constant speed mode of the haptic cane. Moreover, the patient could maintain the preferred walking speeds and gait stability regardless of the magnitude of resistance forces with the admittance control mode of the haptic cane. The proposed robotic gait assistive device with a simple and intuitive mechanism can provide efficient gait training modes to stroke patients with high possibilities of widespread utilizations.

• Journal of rehabilitation welfare engineering & assistive technology
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.169-175
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• 2015

Urine and/or feces disposal systems are expected to replace the diapers currently used for urine and feces disposal for the elderly with urinal and/or fecal incontinence. The are designed to detect the urine and/or feces, cleanse the excremental body organs with water transported from a cleansing water container in the main body, suction them into a fluid waste storage container for future disposal, and dry the area with hot air supplied also from the main body. These systems thus could relieve the chores of a caregiver and could also enhance the patient's hygiene. We reviewed in this paper the detection systems of urine and feces, the main components of the urine and feces disposal systems, and tried to classify the systems currently available in the market.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SC
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• v.44 no.4 s.316
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• pp.8-14
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• 2007

Social participation of the elderly and people with disabilities continuously becomes more active due to improvement of social systems and technological development. Various assistive systems, such as intelligence robots and intelligence home systems, have been developed to support the social participation, and obviously contributed to independent lives of the elderly and people with disabilities. These systems, however, usually require expensive special hardware. To relieve a financial burden software-oriented approaches, which utilizes existing hardware such as laptops, can be an alternative. The software should be developed considering users with physical limitation and without much knowledge of computers. This paper suggests software-oriented approaches to solve these problems and describes an actual development procedure of the software with related theories. We also introduce an unified user interface for a special work chair as a real application.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.97-104
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• 2015

A fuzzy controller and a 2-dimensional wire-driven heavy material lifting system helping human operator are proposed in this paper. The 2-dimensional wire-driven heavy material lifting system is a kind of human-assistive systems in which a human is involved in the control loop. Most of the existing human-assistive control systems cannot consider human operator's characteristic. To consider human operator's characteristic, human's operating motion and requirement of reducing operator's force to lift a heavy material are considered in the design process of the proposed fuzzy controller. The performance of the proposed system is verified by experiments.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 2007.04a
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• pp.222-224
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• 2007

Social participation of the elderly and the disabled continuously becomes more active due to the improvement of social systems and technological development. Various systems such as intelligence robots and intelligence home systems have been developed to support their social participation, and those systems obviously contribute to the independent lives of the elderly and the disabled. Those systems, however, usually require special hardware, which make them very expensive. Considering the economic difficulties of the users, the problem should be tackled with software-oriented approaches using existing hardware such as laptops. The software should be adapted to users with limited capabilities by enabling them to utilize the system without much knowledge related to computers and also without keyboards and mice. This paper suggests software-oriented approaches to solve those problems with the description of the unified user interface for a special work chair, and introduces an actual development procedure of the program together with real application of related theories.

• Journal of rehabilitation welfare engineering & assistive technology
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.111-115
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• 2011

In this paper, we present a novel time-synchronization method for distributed systems to measure the body motion. The distributed system scheme is considered because human data acquisition systems tend to have a centralized controller with sensors connected with a long range of electric wires running through the subject's body, which results in inconvenience. Utilizing simple key switches and digital input ports for reading the key, the proposed method requires a very simple hardware structure, which means less power consumption compared with the well-known ubiquitous sensor network. After measuring the motion data as well as the synchronization pulses, the proposed method compensates, in offline, the difference of the sampling instance between the two systems by scaling the time difference. The paper presents experimental results to show the validity of the proposed method.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.19 no.12
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• pp.523-530
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• 2021

The study is purposed to investigate the current status of assistive technology devices(ATDs) and to explore ways to improve the ATDs support system for work. As a method, domestic and foreign systems were investigated to derive implications can be applied in Korea based on the analysis framework that compromised Gilbert and Terrell's policy analysis model and research purpose. Next, a survey was conducted on 202 disabled supported ATDs for Work. They were looking for a job or working. We would like to suggest a plan as follows. First, it is necessary to improve the support process centered on consumers. Second, the expansion of items and supplementation of the quality management system should be considered. Third, it is urgent to expand the application qualifications. Finally, the foundation for improvement should be continuously laid. We expected the direction of improvement of the support system will be established.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.420-426
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• 2020

In this study, an assistive device for BVM (Bag Valve Mask) was developed. When emergencies occur, rescuers must perform artificial respiration within four minutes utilizing suitable BVM. If not, the patient can suffer serious damage within their brain and body systems. The rescuer must execute artificial respiration until the patient arrives at the hospital. In the process of artificial respiration, the rescuer can feel fatigued in their forearm muscles, particularly those who may have smaller hands or weaker muscle strength. Many products have been developed to solve these problems, but these products are difficult to market and commercialize because of their volume, size, and difficulty of use. In this paper, the BVM assistive device that has been previously manufactured was improved, and an attempt was made to devise a new method that reduces the burden on the user. The BVM assistive device can be divided into three-parts: a head part for compressing the air bag, which can control the amount of air; the body part for coupling with BVM; and finally, the handle that can rotate for better use on various postures of patients. Throughout the experiment, the assistive device could inject an equal amount of air into the patients. As a result, the rescuer could feel less fatigue and inject a suitable amount of air to emergency patients during artificial respiration.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.13 no.12
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• pp.6040-6045
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• 2012

In this study, by utilizing the information fusion of multi sensor data and time within the crosswalk safety Assistive gait secondary to the safety of pedestrians on the system design and system performance verification through support to. Environmental awareness, and time information in addition to leveraging the default behavior for pedestrian safety design of the secondary system performed a study on the scenario and the behavior of a system for fuzzy control was performed for each sensor data processing, median filtering, including filters processing leveraging, and was attached by the time we complete the final algorithm, the system behavior. In addition, taking advantage of the sensor measurements, so basically uncertainties and sensor results, and you want to give at least the reliability of the data fusion experiment equipment using this simple verification.

• Korean Journal of Audiology
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.105-111
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• 2014

Assistive listening devices (ALDs) refer to various types of amplification equipment designed to improve the communication of individuals with hard of hearing to enhance the accessibility to speech signal when individual hearing instruments are not sufficient. There are many types of ALDs to overcome a triangle of speech to noise ratio (SNR) problems, noise, distance, and reverberation. ALDs vary in their internal electronic mechanisms ranging from simple hard-wire microphone-amplifier units to more sophisticated broadcasting systems. They usually use microphones to capture an audio source and broadcast it wirelessly over a frequency modulation (FM), infra-red, induction loop, or other transmission techniques. The seven types of ALDs are introduced including hardwire devices, FM sound system, infra-red sound system, induction loop system, telephone listening devices, television, and alert/alarm system. Further development of digital wireless technology in hearing instruments will make possible direct communication with ALDs without any accessories in the near future. There are two technology solutions for digital wireless hearing instruments improving SNR and convenience. One is near-field magnetic induction combined with Bluetooth radio frequency (RF) transmission or proprietary RF transmission and the other is proprietary RF transmission alone. Recently launched digital wireless hearing aid applying this new technology can communicate from the hearing instrument to personal computer, phones, Wi-Fi, alert systems, and ALDs via iPhone, iPad, and iPod. However, it comes with its own iOS application offering a range of features but there is no option for Android users as of this moment.