• Journal of rehabilitation welfare engineering & assistive technology
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.9-15
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• 2012

In this paper, the feasibility of a wheelchair carrier for the disabled own driver is checked kinematically to fit one of current domestic vans by drawings, design. A van with 9 passengers is selected for the modification to attach the wheelchair carrier and test the operation in real situation. The trajectory and motion process are studied to protect from the interception with outside body of van, and the conceptual design is proceeded kinematically. For the detail design, the stress analysis and driving mechanism with power supply must be studied and selected basically.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.45 no.2
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• pp.57-65
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• 2024

Recently, several studies have been conducted to lower the cost of transport of human by adding external joint stiffness elements. However, it has not been clearly elucidated whether adaptation time is required for human subjects to adapt to the added external joint stiffness. In this study, carbon plates in the form of shoe midsoles were added to the metatarsophalangeal joint, and the lower limb joint torque and mechanical energy consumption were compared before and after a total of 5 sessions (2.5 weeks) of running. A total of 11 young healthy participants exhibited higher elastic energy storage in carbon plates in the fifth session compared to the first session, and lower power in the ankle joint. This suggests that a single training session may be insufficient to validate the efficiency effect of added joint stiffness, and the human body seems to increase the elastic energy stored in the assistive joint stiffness and its reutilization.

• Journal of rehabilitation welfare engineering & assistive technology
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.301-308
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• 2015

The purpose of this study was to compare core muscle activity and thickness in the abdomen (internal Oblique, IO; External Oblique, EO; Transverse Abdominis, TrA) according to walking training methods. Tests were performed on 20 healthy men who randomly assigned to two groups, divided by Nordic walking (n=10) or Power walking group (n=10). They were performed Nordic walking or Power walking training for 2 weeks that is consistent with each of the assigned groups. Results demonstrated that Nordic walking was more effective than Power walking in improving IO and EO activities. Nordic walking is believed to be useful method for a variety of therapeutic exercise as a stable balance with the stick in addition to normal gait and trunk stability.

• Journal of rehabilitation welfare engineering & assistive technology
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.13-18
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• 2013

In this paper design a 8 bit Current Steering D/A Converter for stimulating neuron signal. Proposed circuit in paper shows the conversion rate of 10KS/s and the power supply of 3.3V with 0.35um Magna chip CMOS process using full custom layout design. It employes segmented structure which consists of 3bit thermometer decoders and 5bit binary decoder for decreasing glitch noise and increasing resolution. So glitch energy is down by $10nV{\bullet}sec$ rather than binary weighted type DAC. And it makes use of low power current stimulator because of low LSB current. And it can make biphasic signal by connecting with Micro Controller Unit which controls period and amplitude of signal. As result of measurement INL is +0.56/-0.38 LSB and DNL is +0.3/-0.4 LSB. It shows great linearity. Power dissipation is 6mW.

• Journal of rehabilitation welfare engineering & assistive technology
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.81-87
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• 2015

In order for a Power Assisted Wheelchair (PAW) to maintain a straight driving direction, the same force must be delivered to both wheels. However, a human has different strength between the right and left arms, and cannot control the force uniformly at all times. Therefore, appropriate assist torque shall be generated from unbalanced human torque inputs by detecting the user intention, in order to maintain direction uniformly in straight sections or change direction quickly in curved sections. In this study, a special function is proposed to detect the intention of drivers on the basis of temporal similarity between the input torque signals, and a torque balancing technique based on this function is proposed. In the experiments, the effectiveness of the proposed torque balancing method are verified.

• Journal of rehabilitation welfare engineering & assistive technology
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.41-46
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• 2014

In this paper, we propose a novel voice activity detection (VAD) algorithm using feature vectors based on TE (teager energy). Specifically, power spectral deviation (PSD), which is used as the feature for the VAD in the IS-127 noise suppression algorithm, is obtained after the input signal is transfomed by Teager energy operator. In addition, the TE-based likelihhod ratio are derived in each frame to modifiy the PSD for further VAD. The performance of our proposed VAD algorithm are evaluated by objective testing (total error rate, receiver operating characteristics, perceptual evaluation of speech quality) under various environments, and it is found that the proposed method yields better results than conventional VAD algorithms in the non-stationary noise environments under 5 dB SNR (total error rate = 2.6% decrease, PESQ score = 0.053 improvement).

• Journal of rehabilitation welfare engineering & assistive technology
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.133-139
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• 2016

An electric wheelchair is a assistive device to maneuver on the ground. Tip-over of an electric wheelchair is increasing every year. Dynamic stability metric test item in KS P 7176 has not ensured safety of electric wheelchair on the slope. This study presents design the foldable electric wheelchair that can load in the car and analysis of tip-over measurement which is easily computed for electric wheelchair. Wheelchair frame is designed with a four-bar link mechanism for a foldable structure, and seat module, battery and power driving module can be separated. This analysis is performed during a maneuver on the ground by force-moment stability metric. Several elements, center of gravity position, rotational radius and acceleration, were evaluated how to affect stability metric. This stability metric can reduce tip-over of wheelchair and provide a clue to make of dynamic stability test item.

• 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 Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2009.06a
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• pp.989-990
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• 2009

• Journal of rehabilitation welfare engineering & assistive technology
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.35-40
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• 2013

In WBAN environment, it is very important to achieve energy efficiency of master and nodes, At the same time, a master also plays an important role in collecting data from nodes and controlling the nodes. By maintaining a master properly, any kinds of situation can be handled. Therefore, low power MAC protocol between a master and a node is highly required appropriately. We propose an improved MAC protocol by simply changing the frame structure of WBAN system. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme attains a lot of saving of energy consumption of master and each node compared with IEEE 802.15.6 and conventional schemes.