• Journal of The Korea Institute of Healthcare Architecture
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.15-23
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• 2007

Increase of aging population and demands for care and support systems, needs and demands for a variety of care services and housing facilities have increased. With the emergence of gerontechnology, tangible and intangible technologies and innovations have been explored and developed in many countries. Since housing environment is very important to define well-being and quality of life of the elderly, technology applications in the living environment are considered as important means. The purpose of this study is to enumerate and investigate technologies for the elderly to assist daily living and help care providers, and to explore technology applications in the built environments. This study also investigate how intelligent technologies are installed in the built environment and physical consideration for a variety of approaches. The content analysis was conducted to investigate technology developments for the elderly based on web materials and publication materials. The seven examples were chosen since they are seeking technologies especially for the elderly or aging-in place. General goals for the diffusion of intelligent homes expecially for the elderly are to be easy to install and remove, unobtrusive, redundant cueing, easy to use, and robust. The results of this study suggest application considerations for the technologies of the built environment for the elderly.

• Korean Institute of Interior Design Journal
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.61-71
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• 2008

The study alms to seek a plan of applying the digital technology to housing for the elderly. The purpose of the study was to grasp the needs of the aged on 30 types of digital systems in housing. The subjects were 120 persons aged of more than 60 years and lived in Busan. Data were collected by the individual interview. The following results were drawn from this study. First, the needs of the aged on the digital systems categorized as safe and security, control of indoor environment, and housework support were very high and should be provided at first. Second, the necessary types of digital systems which should be provided to the digital home for the elderly were digital systems for heating control, health checking, sensing of fire and gas leak, and house cleaning. Also, the basic types of digital systems were ones for invasion and burglarproof, emergency, air cleaning, automatic facet, door locking, and waste collecting. Third, the Income and usage level of digital equipment of the aged influenced to the floods of the aged on the digital system. Therefore, in addition to the necessary and basic types of digital systems mentioned above, the income and usage level of digital equipment should be considered in planning the digital home for the elderly.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2005.06a
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• pp.1163-1168
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• 2005

This paper proposes a soft-remote-control (soft-remocon) system based on EMG signals for the Intelligent Sweet Home. The proposed system is applied to Intelligent Sweet Home which was developed to help the independence living of the elderly and physically handicapped individuals. The goal of proposed system is to control home-installed electronic devices such as TV, air-conditioner, curtain and lamp in Intelligent Sweet Home using EMG signals. Features such as VAR and DAMV having good separability performance are selected for pattern classification. FMMNN is adopted as a pattern classifier. Classification results are allowed to a developed remote control module and then corresponding infrared pulses can operate home-installed electronic devices. We concluded that EMG as an input interface for home-installed electronic devices in Intelligent Sweet Home.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.21 no.4E
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• pp.170-177
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• 2002

The goal of the present research is to improve a quality of life of the elderly with a dementia. In this paper, it is realized by developing the dialog system that is controlled by three kinds of modules such as speech recognition engine, graphical agent, or database classified by a nursing schedule. The system was evaluated in an actual environment of a nursing facility by introducing it to an older male patient with dementia. The comparison study between dialog system and professional caregivers was then carried out at nursing home for 5 days in each case. The evaluation results showed that the dialog system was more responsive in catering to needs of dementia patient than professional caregivers. Moreover, the proposed system led the patient to talk more than caregivers did.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.23-32
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• 2008

This paper presents a task planning system for a steward robot, which has been developed as an interactive intermediate agent between an end-user and a complex smart home environment called the ISH (Intelligent Sweet Home) at KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology). The ISH is a large-scale robotic environment with various assistive robots and home appliances for independent living of the elderly and the people with disabilities. In particular, as an approach for achieving human-friendly human-robot interaction, we aim at 'simplification of task commands' by the user. In this sense, a task planning system has been proposed to generate a sequence of actions effectively for coordinating subtasks of the target subsystems from the given high-level task command. Basically, the task planning is performed under the framework of STRIPS (Stanford Research Institute Problem Solver) representation and the split planning method. In addition, we applied a state-partitioning technique to the backward split planning method to reduce computational time. By analyzing the obtained graph, the planning system decomposes an original planning problem into several independent sub-problems, and then, the planning system generates a proper sequence of actions. To show the effectiveness of the proposed system, we deal with a scenario of a planning problem in the ISH.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.53-59
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• 2008

Recently, vision-based hand gesture recognition techniques have been developed for assisting elderly and disabled people to control home appliances. Frequently occurred problems which lower the hand gesture recognition rate are due to the inter-person variation and intra-person variation. The recognition difficulty caused by inter-person variation can be handled by using user dependent model and model selection technique. And the recognition difficulty caused by intra-person variation can be handled by using fuzzy logic. In this paper, we propose multivariate fuzzy decision tree learning and classification method for a hand motion recognition system for multiple users. When a user starts to use the system, the most appropriate recognition model is selected and used for the user.