• Korean Institute of Interior Design Journal
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• v.14 no.4 s.51
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• pp.54-61
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• 2005

The purpose of this study is to examine the physical factors of work environment and to establish the evaluation factors for office design for wheelchair users. This study is based on the existing research for office environmental factors; and then clarifies the physical factors that are suitable for circumstances of wheelchair users. These factors are composed three physical factors which are space, furniture arrangement, and ambient condition and then each of these factors has detailed several elements. Futhermore, comparing physical factors between a non-wheelchair user and a wheelchair user with work environment is analyzed on the assumption using the system furniture on the market. This study is expected to be used as basic information to provide the way of improving office space plan for wheelchair user in workplace. This resource can serve as a checklist when renovating, re-designing or building a new office space for wheelchair users. The evaluation of office environmental factors for wheelchair users who work in public and/or private companies is needed for the next research.

• Fashion & Textile Research Journal
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.225-234
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• 2016

An online suit-customizing system for the special accessibility needs of wheelchair users should be developed because the demand for business suits by wheelchair users involved in economic activities has increased. This study develops a user interface an online customizing system for men's suits specialized for wheelchair users. This study used a five-step approach: (1) search for online men's suits customizing system in web porter sites, (2) select three sites based on three terms, (3) heuristic testing with five web specialists, (4) development of a system user interface based on suggestions for improvement from the heuristic test, (5) usability testing of the user interface prototype by 10 disabled men in wheelchairs. The interface of Company S had high ratings on interactivity, accessibility, informativeness, and consistency in the heuristic test results; subsequently, a user interface was developed based on suggestions for improvement from the heuristic test. This online user interface for customizing men's suits provides better usability to wheelchair users than existing online interfaces aimed at the non-disabled and disabled; consequently, this study contributes to the commercialization of an online customizing system for men's suits specializing in serving wheelchair users.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 2004.11c
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• pp.6-8
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• 2004

The objective of this paper is to develop a powered wheelchair controller based on EMG for users with high-level spinal cord injury using a proportional control scheme. An advantage of EMG is relative convenience of acquisition by a surface electrode to users. Direction information can be easily extracted from two EMG channels and force information can be acquired by proportional relationship between the amplitude of EMG and user's power, respectively. Pattern classification algorithm is a threshold method with a supervised learning process. Furthermore, the emergency situation can be avoided using an interrupt function. We evaluated the performance of powered wheelchair controller by navigating a pre-defined path with three non-handicapped people. The results show the feasibility of EMG as an input interface for powered wheelchair and other devices for the seriously disabled.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.37 no.5
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• pp.161-167
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• 2016

Recent technological advances in sensor fabrication and bio-signal processing enabled non-constraint and non-intrusive measurement of human bio-signals. Especially, non-constraint measurement of ECG makes it available to estimate various human health parameters such as heart rate. Additionally, non-constraint ECG measurement of wheelchair user provides real-time health parameter information for emergency response. For accurate emergency response with low false alarm rate, it is necessary to discriminate quality levels of ECG measured using non-constraint approach. Health parameters acquired from low quality ECG results in inaccurate information. Thus, in this study, a machine learning based approach for three-class classification of ECG quality level is suggested. Three sensors are embedded in the back seat, chest belt, and handle of automatic wheelchair. For the two sensors embedded in back seat and chest belt, capacitively coupled electrodes were used. The accuracy of quality level classification was estimated using Monte Carlo cross validation. The proposed approach demonstrated accuracy of 94.01%, 95.57%, and 96.94% for each channel of three sensors. Furthermore, the implemented algorithm enables classification of user posture by detection of contacted electrodes. The accuracy for posture estimation was 94.57%. The proposed algorithm will contribute to non-constraint and robust estimation of health parameter of wheelchair users.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Costume
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• v.56 no.6 s.105
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• pp.58-71
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• 2006

This research is aimed to develop the functional clothing designs for disabled women in the manner of investigating design preferences among them by means of questionnaire and interview with 150 disabled women as respondents and interviewees. The findings of this research are summarized as follows: 1. Regarding satisfaction with ready-made clothes, the respondents answered 'very satisfied' (1.6%), 'usually satisfied' (14.1%), 'moderate' (20.3%) and 'unsatisfied' (53.1%), suggesting that they had been generally unsatisfied with ready-made clothes. 2. There were more disabled women preferring to ready-made clothes with one-grade bigger (loose.) size than the actual one (53.1%) instead of completely fitted size (43.8%) when they purchased such clothes. This result indicates that they prefer to ready-made clothes with bigger size than the actual one because most of such clothes are made up of non-elastic materials which may be unfavorable for wearer's activities. 3. It was found that primarily worn upper garment among them was T-shirt (59.4%). The reason may be that T-shirt is favorable for using prosthesis and orthotics such as wheelchair, walking stick and crutches thanks to its remarkably high activity as well as simple to maintain, compared with other kinds of upper garments. 4. Regarding preferences to functional clothing designs, the primarily worn lower garment among them was trousers (85.9%); the reason was easiness to move. The main reasons of avoiding to wear a skirt included 'difficult to move' (40.6%) and 'exposed disabled region' (30.3%). Accordingly, functional clothing for disabled women should be developed in consideration for their individual characteristics of disability associated with the disabled region such as wheelchair user, crutch user or brace user, In addition, the designs should be made so that they are not different from those for non-disabled people.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.26 no.6
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• pp.250-258
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• 2007

Current speech recognition technology s achieved high performance with the development of hardware devices, however it is insufficient for some applications where high reliability is required, such as voice control of powered wheelchairs for disabled persons. For the system which aims to operate powered wheelchairs safely by voice in real environment, we need to consider that non-voice commands such as user s coughing, breathing, and spark-like mechanical noise should be rejected and the wheelchair system need to recognize the speech commands affected by disability, which contains specific pronunciation speed and frequency. In this paper, we propose non-voice rejection method to perform voice/non-voice classification using both YIN based fundamental frequency(F0) extraction and reliability in preprocessing. We adopted a multi-template dictionary and acoustic modeling based speaker adaptation to cope with the pronunciation variation of inarticulately uttered speech. From the recognition tests conducted with the data collected in real environment, proposed YIN based fundamental extraction showed recall-precision rate of 95.1% better than that of 62% by cepstrum based method. Recognition test by a new system applied with multi-template dictionary and MAP adaptation also showed much higher accuracy of 99.5% than that of 78.6% by baseline system.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.34 no.1
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• pp.213-221
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• 2014

Since 2005, when "The Mobility Enhancement for the Mobility Impaired Act" was enacted, special transport systems(SPS) has been introduced by each responsible local entity. For its efficient operations and service enhancements, a clear understanding of travel patterns of SPS users is required. Yet we currently have a very limited understanding about them due to a lack of necessary data. This study represents an attempt to provide a better understanding of SPS user's travel patterns with the data generated by Gyeongsangnam-do SPS Call Center. The data include the number, time and day of calls, origins and destinations of callers, types of callers' impairement etc. The data thus allow one to analyze users' travel patterns, including area-wide O-D patterns. There were a number of interesting findings. For example, wheelchair users are only about 42% and the trips are made mostly on non-peak daytime periods. The results are expected to provide a helpful information not just for Center's SPS operations, but for other local entities that are interested in developing similar call centers as well. By refining the SPS system, periodic patterns of callers could be identified in the future.