• Journal of the Korea Safety Management & Science
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.371-378
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• 2014

Manual materials handling tasks are the main risk factors for the work-related musculoskeletal disorders. Many assistant tools for manual materials handling are being used in various kind of industries. One of them is a 4-wheeled cart which is widely used in manufacturing factories, hospitals, etc. The major force required to control the 4-wheeled cart is pushing and pulling. There are two types of handles being used for the 4-wheeled cart : vertical type (two vertical handles), and horizontal type (one horizontal handle). This study tried to investigate the pushing forces and subjective discomforts (hand/writst, shoulder, low back, and overall) of the two handle types with different handle height and distance conditions. Twelve healthy male students (mean age = 23.4 years) participated in the experiment. The independent variables were handle angle (horizontal, vertical), handle height (low, medium, high), and handle distance (narrow, medium, wide). The full factorial design was used for the experiment and the maximum pushing forces were measured in 18 different conditions ($2{\times}3{\times}3$). Analysis of variance (ANOVA) procedure was conducted to test the effects of the independent variables on the pushing force and discomfort levels. Handle height and angle were found to be the critical design factors that affect the maximal pushing forces and subjective discomfort. In the middle height, subjects exerted higher pushing forces, and experience lower discomfort levels compared to the high, and low height. There was no statistical influence of the handle distance to the pushing forces and subjective discomfort levels. It was found out that the effects of the handle angle (horizontal and vertical) on both pushing force and subjective discomfort were statistically significant (p < 0.05). The vertical handle revealed higher pushing force and lower discomfort level than the horizontal handle. The reason for that was thought to be the different postures of the hand when grasping the handles. The horizontal handle induced pronaton of the hand and made hand posture more deviated from the neutral position.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.172-177
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• 2013

With Brain Computer Interface (BCI) system, a person with disabled limb could use this direct brain signal like electroencephalography (EEG) to control a device such as the artifact arm. The precise force control for the artifact arm is necessary for this artificial limb system. To understand the relationship between control EEG signal and the gripping force of hands, We proposed a study by measuring EEG changes of three grades (25%, 50%, 75%) of hand grip MVC (Maximal Voluntary Contract). The acquired EEG signal was filtered to obtain power of three wave bands (alpha, beta, gamma) by using fast fourier transformation (FFT) and computed power spectrum. Then the power spectrum of three bands (alpha, beta and gamma) of three classes (MVC 25%, 50%, 75%) was classified by using PCA (Principal Component Analysis) and LDA (Linear Discriminant Analysis). The result showed that the power spectrum of EEG is increased at MVC 75% more than MVC 25%, and the correct classification rate was 52.03% for left hand and 77.7% for right hand.

• Journal of Preventive Medicine and Public Health
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• v.27 no.4 s.48
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• pp.763-776
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• 1994

Recent studies reveal that grip forces during the hand-arm vibration are most significant for the genesis of vibration-induced white linger syndrome. Therefore, exerted grip forces and skin temperatures of fingers were regarded as dependent variables in experiments and the effects of grip temperature, noise, pushing force, vibration and the combined effect of vibration and pushing force were studied. The objectives of the present study were, first, to varify and compare the changes of grip force affected by grip temperature, noise, pushing force, vibration and the combined effect of vibration and pushing force and, second, to observe the reaction of finger skin temperature affected by above factors. Forty-six healthy male students ($25.07{\pm}2.85$) participated in five systematically permuted trials, which endured 4 minutes each other. Experiments were executed in a special chamber with an air temperature of 21C. In each experiments, the subjects were exposed to five experiment types: (1) grip force of 25N only, (2) pushing force of 50N, (3) acceleration of vibration $7.1m/sec^2(z-direction)$, (4) pink noise of 95 dB (A) and (5) combination of pushing force 50N and acceleration of vibration $7.1m/sec^2$. A repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) was performed on the grip force to test whether it was affected by noise, pushing force, vibration and pushing force. The present results show that vibration was significantly related to the increase of grip force, but the other factors, such as pushing force, noise and grip temperature had no signigicant influence on the increase of grip force, and that the reaction of finger skin temperature were significantly affected by the skin temperature at start of experiment and grip temperature, not grip force and other experimental conditions. Therefore, we suggest that the management for decreasing the grip force is meaningful to prevent the occurrence of Hand-arm vibration syndrome (HAVS).

• Journal of the Ergonomics Society of Korea
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.1-6
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• 2008

Individual finger/total grip forces, and subjective preferences for various individual finger grip spans (i.e., four fingers had identical grip spans or different grip spans) were evaluated by using an "Adjustable Multi-Finger Force Measurement (MFFM) System". In this study, three grip spans were defined as follows: a 'favorite grip span' which is the span with the highest subjective preference; a 'maximum grip span' which is the span with the highest total grip force; a 'maximum finger grip span' which is a set of four grip spans that had maximum finger grip forces associated with the index, middle, ring, and little fingers, respectively. Ten males were recruited from university population for this study. In experiment I, each participant tested the maximum grip force with five grip spans (45 to 65mm) to investigate grip forces and subjective preferences for three types of grip spans. Results showed that subjective preferences for grip spans were not coincidence with the performance of total grip forces. It was noted that the 'favorite grip span' represented the lowest total grip force, whereas the 'maximum finger grip span' showed the lowest subjective preferences. The individual finger forces and the average percentage contribution to the total finger force were also investigated in this study. The findings of this study might be valuable information for designing ergonomics hand-tools to reduce finger/hand stress as well as to improve tool users' preferences and performance.

• Journal of the Ergonomics Society of Korea
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.29-37
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• 2007

This study was performed to evaluate the characteristics of transmitted vibration to hand-arm system under different work posture while operating a light-weighted powered hand grinder. For the experiment, 8 different types of wrist posture (natural, unlar-flexion, radual-flexion, flexion, extension, complex posture, and etc.) and 3 types of feed force (20[N], 50[N], 70[N]) were considered. 10 male subjects were employed to polish metal plate with a hand grinder. All of them were normal and healthy with no history and symptom of the work related musculoskeletal disorders in the dominant hand. Vibration acceleration data were recorded with sampling rate, 2048[Hz]. In addition, unweighted overall R.M.S. acceleration at the tool and wrist, and transmissibility between them were used to evaluate factors from the recorded tri-axial vibration acceleration. The results indicate that transmissibility of natural wrist posture was significantly higher than others. In addition, as the feed force becomes larger, the vibration was transmitted in large quantities to hand-arm system through radius.

• Proceedings of the Korean Operations and Management Science Society Conference
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• 1996.04a
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• pp.141-146
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• 1996

Hand posture and force, which define aspects of the way an object is grasped, are features of robotics manipulation. A means for specifying these grasping "flavors" has been developed that uses an instrumented glove equipped with joint and force sensors. The new grasp specification system is being used at the Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) in a Virtual Reality based Point-and-Direct(VR-PAD) robotics implementation. In the Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) Laboratory at Penn State, hand posture and force data were collected for manipulating bricks and other items that require varying amounts of force at multiple pressure points. The feasibility of measuring desired grasp characteristics was demonstrated for a modified Cyberglove impregnated with FSR (Force Sensitive Resistor) pressure sensors in the fingertips. A joint/force model relating the parameters of finger articulation and pressure to various lifting tasks was validated for the instrumented "wired" glove. Operators using such a modified glove may ultimately be able to configure robot grasping tasks in environments involving hazardous waste remediation, flexible manufacturing, space operations and other flexible robotics applications. In each case, the VR-PAD approach improved the computational and delay problems of real-time multiple-degree-of-freedom force feedback telemanipulation.ck telemanipulation.

• Journal of the Ergonomics Society of Korea
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.165-176
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• 1996

Hand posture and force, which define aspects of the way an object is grasped, are features of robotic manipulation. A means for specifying these grasping "flavors" has been developed that uses an instrumented glove equipped with joint and force sensors. The new grasp specification system is being used at the Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) in a Virtual Reality based Point-and-Direct (VR-PAD) robotics implementation. In the Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) Laboratory at Penn State, hand posture and force data were collected for manipulating bricks and other items that require varying amounts of force at multiple pressure points. The feasibility of measuring desired grasp characteristics was demonstrated for a modified Cyberglove impregnated with FSR (Force Sensitive Resistor) pressure sensors in the fingertips. A joint/force model relating the parameters of finger articulation and pressure to various lifting tasks was validated for the instrumented "wired" glove. Operators using such a modified glove may ultimately be able to configure robot grasping tasks in environments involving hazardous waste remediation, flexible manufactruing, space operations and other flexible robotics applications. In each case, the VR-PAD approach improved the computational and delay problems of real-time multiple- degree-of-freedom force feedback telemanipulation.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.17 no.10
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• pp.1014-1020
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• 2011

This presents a motion and force estimation system of human fingers by using an Electromyography (EMG) sensor module and a data glove system to be proposed in this paper. Both EMG sensor module and data glove system are developed in such a way to minimize the number of hardware filters in acquiring the signals as well as to reduce their sizes for the wearable. Since the onset of EMG precedes the onset of actual finger movement by dozens to hundreds milliseconds, we show that it is possible to predict the pattern of finger movement before actual movement by using the suggested system. Also, we are to suggest how to estimate the grasping force of hand based on the relationship between RMS taken EMG signal and the applied load. Finally we show the effectiveness of the suggested estimation system through several experiments.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2007.11a
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• pp.221-222
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• 2007

• Proceedings of the KIPE Conference
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• 2007.07a
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• pp.340-342
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• 2007

This paper presents the grip force control of myoelectric hand prosthesis according to myoelectric signal generated in the human muscle. The control system consist of a controller for driving DC motor, torque sensor for measuring out torque of motor, slip sensor for detecting slip of torque. The experimental results proved the reliability of proposed control system.