Search results

The purpose of this paper is to describe a standing style transfer system, ABLE, designed to enable a person with disabled lower limbs to do daily‐life activities without special infrastructure. Actually, ABLE is mainly intended for use by people who have spinal cord injuries and who cannot move hip joints and lower extremities: the level of spinal cord injury is L1.

ABLE comprises three modules: a powered lower extremity orthosis, a pair of telescopic crutches, and a pair of mobile platforms. When traveling in a standing position, the user wears the powered lower extremity orthosis to fix his posture, and rides on the mobile platforms. The user uses crutches to keep his body stable. These telescopic crutches also play an important role of power assistance in standing‐up and sitting‐down motions, or going up/down a step. The user can enter narrow spaces, although stability is emphasized in wide spaces because it is possible to alter the contact points of the crutches freely.

Motions are discussed in a standing position: traveling and rotating, and the chair and step motions. Experimental results related to these motions confirm the design's effectiveness. The authors improve previously developed mobile platforms for better operationality and stability. An ultrasonic motor was used for steering the mobile platform instead of the prior DC motor. The benefits of the ultrasonic motor enable the new platform to reduce its backlash in steering. A supporting plate and an active ankle joint attached to each mobile platform contribute stability when traveling in the standing position. The authors show the experimental results using new mobile platforms.

The paper demonstrates novelty and originality of ABLE in its composition, which enables a person with disabled lower limbs to travel in a standing position on a pair of small mobile platforms. This system is regarded as a biped‐type leg‐wheeled robot system that has high energy efficiency and good mobility for steps because of its wheels and legs; moreover, it has a pair of crutches for stability.

Lower extremity exoskeletons have drawn much attention recently due to their potential ability to help the stroke and spinal cord injury patients to regain the ability of walking. However, the balance of the human-exoskeleton system (HES) remains a big challenge. Usually, patients use crutches to keep balance when they wear exoskeleton. However, the balance depends greatly on the patient's balance ability and will be inevitably poor occasionally, which often causes the landing in advance of HES. The purpose of this paper is to propose a real-time stepping gait trajectory planning method based on the hip height variation of the swing leg to solve the problem.

The hip height of the swing leg was analyzed and measured. The simulation with MATLAB and the experimental test with the prototype of the proposed gait were conducted to verify its feasibility.

With the proposed method, HES can achieve successful step even when the balance kept by crutches is poor.

Instead of actively avoiding the poor balance due to the instability caused by gravity, the method just modifies the stepping gait passively to avoid the landing in advance when the poor balance appears. In addition, it may not work well when the balance is too poor. Moreover, the proposed gait is just used in the initial stage of rehabilitation training. Besides, the step length of the gait must be limited for comfort.

A real-time stepping gait trajectory planning method based on the hip height variation of the swing leg is first proposed and its feasibility to avoid the landing in advance when the balance kept by the crutches is poor has been preliminary verified.

The three authors of this paper are intrigued by ideas and how they are created. The purpose of this paper is to explore idea creation and work by means of remote collaborative autoethnography.

During the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, the authors sent texts to each other, followed up on each other's thoughts and discussed them in online meetings. They shared, analyzed and eventually theorized their lived experiences in order to understand creating ideas as social and cultural experience.

The authors develop the notions of “shelter” and “crutch” to make sense of the complexity of creating ideas together; theorize how emotions and identities are entangled in idea work; and discuss how time, space and power relations condition it.

The authors contribute to understanding idea work in a remote collaborative autoethnography by highlighting its emotional, identity-related and power-laden nature.

Dr. L. Botting, Engineering Controller—Advanced Systems, discusses the historical and technical background to one of NGL's many contributions to the Panavia Tornado, describes its operation and the newly established advanced manufacturing unit at NGL's Ordnance Division in Crewkerne which produces it.

Most current lower extremity exoskeletons emphasize assistance for walking rather than stability. The purpose of this paper is to propose a rehabilitation gait based on the transfer of gravity center to improve the balance of exoskeleton rehabilitation training of the hemiplegic patients in the frontal plane, reducing the dependence on crutches/walking frames.

The real-time and predictable instability factors of human and exoskeleton system (HES) are analyzed. Inspired by the walking balance strategy of the blind, a rehabilitation gait based on the transfer of gravity center is proposed and studied by modeling and experimental test and is finally applied to the prototype – Zhejiang University lower extremity exoskeleton (ZJULEEX) – to verify its feasibility.

At least three real-time and predictable factors cause the instability of HES, and the factor of lateral tilt caused by gravity should be focused in the balance control of frontal plane. With the proposed gait, the hip height of stepping leg of HES does not reduce obviously even when the crutches do not work, which can improve the balance of HES.

However, the rehabilitation gait control needs to be more complete and intelligent to response to other types of perturbations to further improve the balance of HES. In addition, more clinical trials should be conducted to evaluate the effect of the proposed gait.

May bring happiness to the rehabilitation of patients with hemiplegia.

The rehabilitation gait based on the transfer of gravity center to improve the balance of HES is first proposed and applied to HES.

This exploratory study aims to focus on the challenges arising from the interactions between wheelchair users, individuals using crutches and blind people with the hotel environment as well as on the efforts to overcome these challenges.

The sample was gathered through a snowballing technique. The study utilizes in‐depth semi‐structured interviews of 45 participants: 20 used wheelchairs; ten were dependent on crutches; and 15 were blind. The data were subject to thematic content analysis.

Interpreted by the social model of disability, the results suggest that the challenges participants confront derive from the physical design of the environment as well as staff behaviors. Differences were found between the hotel experiences of people with various types of disabilities.

The sample was limited to Israeli participants.

The paper offers recommendations for hotel management with regard to specific physical as well as interpersonal means to alleviate apparent difficulties faced by people with disabilities in their hotel experiences.

This study broadcasts the genuine voice of people with disabilities. The findings are of special relevance to hospitality researchers, educators, executives, and hotel staff.

This is a cry: “Let us face reality!” This article builds on Friedrich Nietzsche and argues against transcendental truth, which is the basis of spirituality. Instead, we need merely to face up to the radical contingency of life in a multi-cultured society. The rules of ethics and morality are contextual and they change over time. Standards are not found but our discourse and interaction establish them. We need to recall Promethean, who was the hero of humans against the gods and provided humans with out running start. That is really all we have but that can be enough. In public administration, we need to not look to gods, God, or spirituality; but instead we need to look to what Promethean gave us and face our intractable problems with the spirit of Promethean. We need to reject those that say they have The Truth as they seek to impose their version on us by thrusting under our arm pits crutches, which we do not need.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the barriers identified by people with disabilities in visiting casinos.

Face-to-face interviews were conducted with 12 people with disabilities recruited from the investigator's clinical and community networks and personal referrals, and 18 casino supervisors and dealers who attended a casino diploma course offered by a university. The data were subjected to thematic content analysis.

The results indicated that customers with disabilities faced physical, human and financial barriers during their visit to casinos. The six barriers that were commonly identified by all participants included: the physical barriers in game playing; insufficient facilities and accessibility; insufficient space; entrance blockage; poor staff service; and insufficient information and communication. There were two other barriers reported only by the participants with disabilities – social exclusion and financial barriers. Differences in comparison to the barriers that this market segment had encountered in other tourism contexts are also discussed.

The sample is limited to Macao participants and the sample size is small.

This study offers recommendations for casino operators and government authorities with regard to specific physical, financial and interpersonal means to alleviate apparent difficulties faced by people with disabilities when visiting a casino.

This study fills the research void in the literature regarding the barriers encountered by people with disabilities in visiting a casino. It also broadcasts the genuine voice of this market segment.

This paper aims to explore how dispositions of nursing habitus carry shift handover into practice in acute care.

Handover (the exchange of information by nurses between shifts) is more recently purported to be a procedure that transfers the responsibility of and accountability for care to maintain patient safety. Using Bourdieu's theory of practice as lens, this paper examines data from an ethnographic study of nurses' work in acute care to reveal what happens in and around nurses' practices of handover.

Exploring handover as a practice enables identification of nurses' responsibilities of work as professional, clinician and employee. These responsibilities are not practised separately, rather, as braided identities they are embodied into nurses' practices of work. Nurses' clinician and employee identities address the clinical and organisationally relevant material contained in handover, but it is in the ways that nurses embody their responses that their professional identity becomes evident.

Viewing handover as a procedure suggests that nurses are rule followers and/or sole players and conceptualises nurses as individualised professionals only. This received knowledge as doxa misrecognises the centrality of connectedness between nurses in their work in the acute care setting.

Recognising nurses' braided workplace identities as being professional, clinician and employee upends the doxa of nurses work as tasks and roles in the delivery of healthcare in the acute care setting.

Visually impaired people have long been living in the dark. They cannot realize the colorful world with their vision, so they rely on hearing, touch and smell to feel the space they live in. Lacking image information, they face challenges in the external environment and barrier spaces. They face danger that is hundreds of times higher than that faced by normal people. Especially during outdoor activities, they can only explore the surrounding environment aided by their hearing and crutches and then based on a vague impression speculate where they are located. To let the blind confidently take each step, this paper proposes sticking the electronic tag of the radio-frequency identification (RFID) system on the back of guide bricks.

Thus, the RFID reader, ultrasonic sensor and voice chip on a wheeled mobile robot link the front end to the crutch. Once the blind person nears a guide brick, the RFID will read the message on the tag through the voice broadcast system, and a voice will inform the visually impaired person of the direction to walk and information of the surrounding environment. In addition, the CMOS image sensor set up in the wheeled mobile robot is used to detect the black marking on the guide brick and to guide the blind to walk forward or turn around between the two markings. Finally, the lithium battery charging control unit was installed on the wheeled mobile robot. The ATtiny25 microcontroller conducts the battery charge and discharge control and monitoring of the current battery capacity.

The development of this system will let visually impaired people acquire environmental information, road guidance function and nearby traffic information.

Through rich spatial environment messages, the blind can have the confidence and courage to go outside.