• International Journal of Human Ecology
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.29-46
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• 2007

The purpose of this study was to analyze characteristics of the bedroom environment of nursing homes for the elderly in Korea. Field case research was performed using a structured checklist and measurements, from Oct. 28th to Dec. 2nd, 2006. Collected data were analyzed for cognitive efficiency, privacy, safety, supportiveness and amenity. Based on nursing homes for the elderly nationwide (Ministry of Health and Welfare, 2006), we choose 43 facilities in which Seoul and six megalopolis areas that had answered our questionnaire in 2006. We then narrowed the list to 14 facilities, balanced them in terms of regional population. The contents of investigation consisted of eight categories: that general characteristics of the bedrooms (including number of residents per room, using a bed or floor mat, the size and shape of the chamber, space for wheelchair turning, signage), door of bedroom (including door, doorknob, door sill/level difference), windows in the bedroom(including type of window, window sill height, window treatment, window safety device/shape, view/daylight), furniture (including personal furniture and lock), finishes (material, character and color of wall, floor, ceiling), lighting (including types of lighting, night lighting, switch), bathroom in the bedroom (including signage, door size/type, doorknob shape, height of the washbowl, size of toilet bowl, handrail, finishes), and other facilities (including outlet and handrails).

• Physical Therapy Korea
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.71-84
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• 2003

The purpose of this study was to provide information on driving characteristics in persons with spinal cord injury through basic statistic analysis of the survey results. The survey was administered to 44 drivers with spinal cord injury. The subjects' general, neurologic and driving characteristics were analyzed, as well as the degree of difficulty in using their vehicles between tetraplegia and paraplegia. The results were as follows: thirty-five (79.6%) of forty-four respondents was men. The average age was 35.0 years old and the age at the time of injury was 29.0 years old. Their neurologic characteristics were tetraplegics 12 (27.3%) and paraplegics 32 (72.2%). Among complete lesions, the highest level those who could drive independently was C7. All the vehicles were equipped with special devices, including "power steering", "automatic transmission" and "hand controls". The vehicles for cervical cord injury were equipped with "grip bars" as well as for the degree of difficulty in using their vehicles, all the subjects felt that "moving the wheelchair in and out of their vehicles" was too difficult for them to do. We suggest that the driver training should be an essential part of the rehabilitation program for patients with spinal cord injuries to maximize their mobility in the community. This training seems to be essential in order to modify the standards of the Handicapped Drivers Ability Test and to aid the driver rehabilitation program in the health insurance payment system. Also, the driver rehabilitation training program should include instruction in that moving wheelchairs in and out of vehicles.

• Physical Therapy Korea
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.11-19
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• 2014

The purpose of this study was to investigate the activity of the transverse abdominal muscle resulting from changed posture by measuring the thickness of the transverse abdominal muscle in a supine posture, a slouched sitting posture, and an erect sitting posture. The subjects of the study were 28 patients with cerebral palsy. All their transverse abdominal muscles at the end of inhalation were measured at supine, slouched sitting (S sitting) and erect sitting (E sitting) postures by using ultrasonography, and then their dynamic sitting balance was measured at S sitting and E sitting postures by using BioRescue. For the statistical analysis, the Kruskal-Wallis test and the Wilcoxon signed-rank test were used to compare the differences among each the postures. The results were as follows. The thickness of the transverse abdominal muscle when comparing the supine posture and the S sitting posture showed no statistically significant difference. But the E sitting posture showed a statistically significant difference as compared with the others. In addition, the dynamic sitting balance in comparing the S sitting and E sitting postures showed a significant difference. In conclusion, the E sitting posture has a more positive effect on postural control and balance than generally taking the S sitting posture, for the sitting posture of a patient with cerebral palsy. It is suggested that patients with cerebral palsy mainly experiencing a sedentary life or being in a wheelchair should be seated in the E sitting posture during their daily life, and it may be necessary to continue to monitor and manage the proper E sitting posture.

• Journal of The Korea Institute of Healthcare Architecture
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.65-75
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• 2010

This is a comparative study mainly on foreign countries' domestic standards and laws on barrier free housing construction that can be applied to the dwelling of elderly friendly apartment housing. Eight countries - the United States, Germany, Canada, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, and China - were reviewed as foreign cases. The analyzed subjects were design standards only for the disabled and the aged. To compare barrier-free guides of the eight countries, each barrier-free guide on three space units (entrance, bedroom, living room) was divided into 11 design items and 36 design factors. The comparative analysis on foreign cases was based on the design guide according to Korea's KS P 1509 (principle and recommendation for designing dimension of dwelling in consideration of the elderly). Some factors -if with dimensions- were compared by means of the skewness of distribution. In the analysis result, there were not only common standards for the nine countries such as a dimension of the space for wheelchair movement but also different standards such as heights of outlets and horizontal lengths of bathtub grab bars. The detailed analysis shows that it is urgently necessary to prepare new domestic national design standards for 8 factors that foreign countries already have. It is also needed to immediately prepare dimension standards for the design factors, which have no detailed dimensions but only national guides, in consideration for anthropometric dimension.

• Korean Institute of Interior Design Journal
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.217-226
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• 2015

As the aging society is globally increasing, the guide for the aged-friendly city is suggested by WHO and many cities are preparing to meet with it. The base of this guide for an age-friendly city is an active aging. This study examined how degree the neighborhood environment is age-friendly from older persons' standpoints. The data were collected through the interview with old persons who aged more than 65 years, 117 persons in an urban area and 110 ones in a rural area. The age-friendly degree of neighborhood environment was examined from two aspects. One is how close 12 neighborhood facilities were from the elderly's houses. Another one is how degree the elderly were considered in 4 areas: pedestrian road, traffic, the amount of housing for the elderly, and space layouts of their houses. Findings were as follows. First, the elderly related neighborhood facilities in urban area were closer located to old persons' houses than in rural area, except the senior center. Second, in case of the age-friendly degree of their neighborhood environments, the space layout of house was the highest, and then traffic, pedestrian road, and the amount of housing for the elderly, in order. The consideration degree of wheelchair users was the lowest. Third, the age-friendly degree of pedestrian road, traffic, and room layout of house in rural area were higher than in urban area. However, the amount of housing for the elderly in urban area was higher than in rural area.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.38 no.8
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• pp.837-848
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• 2014

This paper describes the development of a walking assistive robot for effective self-rehabilitation for elderly people facing an inconvenience in walking. The main features of the developed robot are enhanced safety and mobility using the baby walker and electric wheelchair mechanisms and an accurate walking tracking control algorithm using potentiometers and stereo cameras. Specifically, a pelvis supporter is designed to prevent the user from falling down and reduce the burden on their legs, and electric motors are used for easy locomotion with low effort. Next, the walking intention and direction of the user are automatically recognized by using potentiometers attached at the pelvis supporter so that the robot can track the user, and the rapidity and accuracy of the tracking were increased by applying a lower-body motion analysis algorithm with stereo cameras. Finally, the user-tracking performance of the developed robot was experimentally verified through stepwise walking assistance experiments.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2008.10a
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• pp.340-347
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• 2008

Ubiquitous services are high quality and differentiated services which are provided for users by recognizing the context of users and environmental conditions actively. In this case, context-aware middleware is one of the most important technologies required to implement the ubiquitous services. In this paper, we propose a method for providing ubiquitous services in a specific user space effectively and monitoring human bio-sensors. That is, the design and implementation of intelligent home service middleware and monitoring bio-sensors based on context awareness is discussed here. Context information from various sensors is gathered, and suitable services are inferred and provided to users by the middleware system. In our approach, user services can be modelled easily by using facts and rules, and the system can be extended easily to support various ubiquitous services other than intelligent home services also. The system can be integrated with external applications and legacy systems effectively by using various protocols such as RMI, socket and HTTP, XML and etc. We have designed and evaluated various facts and rules for intelligent home services in real environments. Functionality evaluation with the system shows that ubiquitous services can be provided to users effectively in a home environment.

• International Journal of Fuzzy Logic and Intelligent Systems
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.149-154
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• 2004

In this research, we selected the speech recognition to implement the electric wheelchair system as a method to control it by only using the speech and used DTW (Dynamic Time Warping), which is speaker-dependent and has a relatively high recognition rate among the speech recognitions. However, it has to have small memory and fast process speed performance under consideration of real-time. Thus, we introduced VQ (Vector Quantization) which is widely used as a compression algorithm of speaker-independent recognition, to secure fast recognition and small memory. However, we found that the recognition rate decreased after using VQ. To improve the recognition rate, we applied ART2 (Adaptive Reason Theory 2) algorithm as a post-process algorithm to obtain about 5% recognition rate improvement. To utilize ART2, we have to apply an error range. In case that the subtraction of the first distance from the second distance for each distance obtained to apply DTW is 20 or more, the error range is applied. Likewise, ART2 was applied and we could obtain fast process and high recognition rate. Moreover, since this system is a moving object, the system should be implemented as an embedded one. Thus, we selected TMS320C32 chip, which can process significantly many calculations relatively fast, to implement the embedded system. Considering that the memory is speech, we used 128kbyte-RAM and 64kbyte ROM to save large amount of data. In case of speech input, we used 16-bit stereo audio codec, securing relatively accurate data through high resolution capacity.

• Proceedings of the Korea Society of Design Studies Conference
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• 2001.10a
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• pp.9.1-9
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• 2001

Concerning the development of suitable healthcare equipment for a aged people at their homes in order to reduce the labor and increase the efficiency in the homehelpers' work, we conducted a study on the actual conditions of healthcare in Kyoto city (healthcare in taking a meal and excretion, moving and taking a bath by using a hand-powered lift, moving by a wheelchair, shower carrier healthcare, assistance in body care and housework) by digital video filming, interviews and layout investigations. On the base of those investigations by using methods for analysis of video pictures, we divided the healthcate work into scenes and e exctracted the main problems in terms of health care equipment, information, environment, healthcare skills, mental burden, social s system, family burden, ete. Furthermore the questionnaire survey of home helpers (18 persons - 50% answers) clarified that more than half of them have lumbago pains and the biggest load in the everyday healthcare c comes from moving the patients or getting them into or out of t the equipment for moving. Finally we considered concrete proposals appropriate for each h healthcare scene image, based on evaluation toward efficiency (design guidelines) for suitable healthcare equipment for aged people at their homes: 1) Design toward a proper posture 2) Design toward self-help possibility 3) Design toward patient active participation 4) Design toward rationality of the whole process 5) Design toward place-appropriate healthcare equipment 6) Design toward healing of mind 7) Good level of healthcare skills 8) Economic, systematic rationality

• Journal of Korean Society of Forest Science
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• v.99 no.3
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• pp.404-413
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• 2010

A study surveyed to visitors' expectation and satisfaction about trail in the Hanbat Arboretum by using Importance-Satisfaction Analysis (ISA). As the results of the research, the mean of importance was 3.85 and the mean of satisfaction was 3.67 in West Garden. Also the mean of importance was 3.99 and the mean of satisfaction was 3.78 in East Garden. Also appeared the evaluation factors of questionnaire the mostly importance that were higher than satisfaction. West Garden appeared necessary for items of safety features, drain facilities and board for risk area. Also East Garden appeared necessary for items of easy move for the wheelchair and carriage and safety features of trail. The research result are expected to provide clear path towards more effective adminstration and management tactics. Also expects with the research result that will be the possibility of raising the qualitative satisfaction of the visitor.