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Devices for step estimation are body-worn devices used to compute steps taken and/or distance covered by the user. Even though textiles or clothing are foremost to come to mind in terms of articles meant to be worn, their prominence among devices and systems meant for cadence is overshadowed by electronic products such as accelerometers, wristbands and smart phones. Athletes and sports enthusiasts using knee sleeves should be able to track their performances and monitor workout progress without the need to carry other devices with no direct sport utility, such as wristbands and wearable accelerometers. The purpose of this study thus is to contribute to the broad area of wearable devices for cadence application by developing a cheap but effective and efficient stride measurement system based on a knee sleeve.

A textile strain sensor is designed by weft knitting silver-plated nylon yarn together with nylon DTY and covered elastic yarn using a 1 × 1 rib structure. The area occupied by the silver-plated yarn within the structure served as the strain sensor. It worked such that, upon being subjected to stress, the electrical resistance of the sensor increases and in turn, is restored when the stress is removed. The strip with the sensor is knitted separately and subsequently sewn to the knee sleeve. The knee sleeve is then connected to a custom-made signal acquisition and processing system. A volunteer was employed for a wearer trial.

Experimental results establish that the number of strides taken by the wearer can easily be correlated to the knee flexion and extension cycles of the wearer. The number of peaks computed by the signal acquisition and processing system is therefore counted to represent stride per minute. Therefore, the sensor is able to effectively count the number of strides taken by the user per minute. The coefficient of variation of over-ground test results yielded 0.03%, and stair climbing also obtained 0.14%, an indication of very high sensor repeatability.

The study was conducted using limited number of volunteers for the wearer trials.

By embedding textile piezoresistive sensors in some specific garments and or accessories, physical activity such as gait and its related data can be effectively measured.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of piezoresistive sensing in the knee sleeve for stride estimation. Also, this study establishes that it is possible to attach (sew) already-knit textile strain sensors to apparel to effectuate smart functionality.

This paper aims to concentrate on recent innovations in flexible wearable sensor technology tailored for monitoring vital signals within the contexts of wearable sensors and systems developed specifically for monitoring health and fitness metrics.

In recent decades, wearable sensors for monitoring vital signals in sports and health have advanced greatly. Vital signals include electrocardiogram, electroencephalogram, electromyography, inertial data, body motions, cardiac rate and bodily fluids like blood and sweating, making them a good choice for sensing devices.

This report reviewed reputable journal articles on wearable sensors for vital signal monitoring, focusing on multimode and integrated multi-dimensional capabilities like structure, accuracy and nature of the devices, which may offer a more versatile and comprehensive solution.

The paper provides essential information on the present obstacles and challenges in this domain and provide a glimpse into the future directions of wearable sensors for the detection of these crucial signals. Importantly, it is evident that the integration of modern fabricating techniques, stretchable electronic devices, the Internet of Things and the application of artificial intelligence algorithms has significantly improved the capacity to efficiently monitor and leverage these signals for human health monitoring, including disease prediction.

Peripheral arterial disease (PAD) is an occlusive atherosclerotic disease that affects blood vessels and reduces blood flow in the lower limbs. It is estimated that around 200 million people worldwide suffered from it, with a significant number of older people affected. Walking is one of the first-line therapeutic measures for intermittent claudication (IC) in patients with PAD. Supervised Exercise Therapy (SET) programs effectively increase walking distances, however, remain an underutilized tool because they are not readily available in most clinical centres, are extremely expensive, and patient participation is low mainly due to socioeconomic constraints. Home-based Exercise Therapy (HBET) programs are an effective and low-cost alternative to improve both the functional capacity and quality of life (QoL) of patients with IC, as they are performed in the patient’s area of residence and not in the hospital. The WalkingPad program conciliated a smartphone app – the WalkingPad app – with behaviour change intervention to increase walking distances and decrease walking impairment as well to improve QoL at 6 months.

This study aims to explore the effects of cat-assisted therapy (Ca-AT) on a patient in their homes, specifically investigating the effects on patient’s memory, behavioral pathology and ability to perform activities of daily living, independently.

A case study design was used in patient’s homes using three measuring scales, namely, Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), Barthel index (BI) and Behavioral Pathology in Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) Rating Scale.

The MMSE and BI mean scores were increased, whereas the Behavioral Pathology mean score was decreased. Patient negative behaviors were improved specifically, aggressiveness, anxieties, phobias, and caregiver burden was decreased.

Patients with AD could significantly benefit from Ca-AT in their own homes, and it could decrease caregiving burden.

Ca-AT is a newly developed type of animal-assisted therapy that uses cats to treat patients, especially elderly people with AD, in their homes.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of different levels of place understanding (primarily typo-morphological analysis) on the nature of interventions within historic urban setting and buildings within the City of Amman.

The research methodology depended on an extensive thematic survey and analysis. The typo-morphological analysis addressed several of Amman's residential hills and their connections with the downtown area. The thematic place survey tool included different units of analysis (e.g. buildings, public spaces, streets and sloped lands between streets) and addressed the values of these various buildings and spaces, their typology, typo-morphology and relation to the urban context, nature of change and transformations over time to mention a few. The extensive survey also included semi-structured interviews about these buildings addressing their emergence, historic context and values.

The paper presents an architectural typology for Amman's architecture and its relationship with the city's morphology stressing the specificity of Amman's historic core and residential hills. The paper also discusses the effect of this level of place understanding on the nature and levels of interventions within historic settings and buildings.

This level of place understanding (typo-morphological analysis) can have a positive impact on the practice of architectural and urban conservation by informing the nature of interventions within historic urban setting and buildings within the city. More specifically, this level of place understanding can, first, inform the development of urban and heritage guidelines within conservation areas in one of Amman's residential neighborhoods (Weibdeh) and, second, inform the nature of interventions to existing historic buildings based on respect of building typology.

This paper contributes to the disciplines of architectural and urban conservation illustrating how place understanding can inform practices of heritage conservation and future policies and strategies concerning new intervention within such heritage places.

This paper aims to optimize the stiffness coefficient of the elastic element for a passive waist assistive exoskeleton (WAE). There is a tradeoff between stiffness coefficient of elastic element of the exoskeleton and work efficiency of the wearer, because elastic element affects original bending motion of the wearer and the force requirement of erector spinae is compensated by the other muscles. However, there is no accepted conclusion on how to determine the proper stiffness coefficient, especially with respected to the effort of groups of muscles, not only erector spinae.

In this study, a consumption indicator based on muscle fatigue of seven muscles is proposed and a Bayesian-based human-in-the-loop optimization approach is adopted to optimize the stiffness coefficient. Pneumatic artificial muscles are used to replace the mechanical elastic part to adjust the assistive force automatically. The proposed optimization method is verified by the way of load-lifting experiments with three different conditions: without exoskeleton, with fixed air pressure and with optimized air pressure. Six subjects participated in the experiment and each experiment is performed in different day.

Compared with No-Exo condition and static assistance condition, the parameter-optimized waist exoskeleton averagely reduces muscle fatigue of the six subjects by 45.30 ± 29.14% and 30.94 ± 30.29%, respectively. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method is effective to reduce muscle fatigue during stoop lifting task.

This paper provides a novel cost function construction method based on muscle fatigue and muscle synergy for passive WAE stiffness optimization.

The purpose of this paper is to design a soft robot for performing detection, by using a hybrid drive to reach the target point faster and enable the robot to perform the detection task at a relatively fast speed.

The soft robot is driven by a mixture of motors and pneumatic pressure, in which the pneumatic pressure is used to drive the soft actuator to bend and the motors to drive the soft robot forward. The careful design of the actuator is based on a finite element simulation using ABAQUS, which combines a constant curvature differential model and the D-H method to analyze the motion space of the soft actuator.

The soft robot’s ability to adapt to the environment and cross obstacles has been demonstrated by building prototypes and complex environments such as grass, gravel, sand and pipes.

This design can improve the speed and smoothness of the motion of the soft robot, while retaining the good environmental flexibility of the soft robot. And the soft robot has good environmental adaptability and the ability to cross obstacles. The soft robot proposed in this paper has broad prospects in fields such as pipeline inspection and field exploration.

The purpose of this paper is to understand compression garment in the area of medical industry, compression garments were used initially for patients with circulatory problems. External pressure was created by compression garments on the body surface which prevents blood clots, leg swelling and improves venous hemodynamics.

Compression rehabilitation is a significant element in the effective management of lower limb problems of people associated with venous, lymphatic, fat disorders like lipoedema.

Compression garments have been attributed primarily for the increase in blood flow, improvement in recovery, reduction in muscle vibration that increase stability, improvement in thermoregulation, decrease in muscle pain, elimination of blood lactate and creatine kinase after exercise.

Compression garments are extraordinary clothes that contain elastomeric yarns or fibers that are responsible for applying significant mechanical pressure on the required body surface for compressing, stabilizing and supporting underlying tissues.

This paper aims to investigate an autonomous obstacle-surmounting method based on a hybrid gait for the problem of crossing low-height obstacles autonomously by a six wheel-legged robot. The autonomy of obstacle-surmounting is reflected in obstacle recognition based on multi-frame point cloud fusion.

In this paper, first, for the problem that the lidar on the robot cannot scan the point cloud of low-height obstacles, the lidar is driven to rotate by a 2D turntable to obtain the point cloud of low-height obstacles under the robot. Tightly-coupled Lidar Inertial Odometry via Smoothing and Mapping algorithm, fast ground segmentation algorithm and Euclidean clustering algorithm are used to recognize the point cloud of low-height obstacles and obtain low-height obstacle in-formation. Then, combined with the structural characteristics of the robot, the obstacle-surmounting action planning is carried out for two types of obstacle scenes. A segmented approach is used for action planning. Gait units are designed to describe each segment of the action. A gait matrix is used to describe the overall action. The paper also analyzes the stability and surmounting capability of the robot’s key pose and determines the robot’s surmounting capability and the value scheme of the surmounting control variables.

The experimental verification is carried out on the robot laboratory platform (BIT-6NAZA). The obstacle recognition method can accurately detect low-height obstacles. The robot can maintain a smooth posture to cross low-height obstacles, which verifies the feasibility of the adaptive obstacle-surmounting method.

The study can provide the theory and engineering foundation for the environmental perception of the unmanned platform. It provides environmental information to support follow-up work, for example, on the planning of obstacles and obstacles.

This paper aims to investigate the innovation pathway of gerontechnological enterprises under the market-organization-technology (MOT) perspective through configuration analysis.

Based on the analytical framework of technology, organization and market, this paper conducts configuration analysis on the cases of 55 elderly-friendly enterprises in China combined with fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA).

First, this study identifies the three first-level preconditions affecting innovation performance: organization's architectural innovation, technology adapting to aging and market environment attention on the innovation pathway of gerontechnological enterprises. These three first-level conditions include six sub-conditions. Second, this study investigates three innovation pathways by analyzing the configuration effects of preconditions: Configuration 1, technology-balanced type; Configuration 2, organization-market linkage type and Configuration, 3 balanced type. Third, there are differences in the distribution of different configuration types in subdivided industries. The technology-balanced configuration is mainly concentrated in design-driven innovative enterprises, the organization-market linkage configuration is mainly concentrated in medical auxiliary equipment enterprises and the balanced configuration is mainly concentrated in smart elderly care service platform enterprises empowered by digital technology. Fourth, there are differences in the innovation impact paths of the same configuration type. However, the essence lies in the high-level innovation performance formed by the coordinated evolution of technology, organization and market factors, reflecting the characteristics of the same goal through different routes.

The authors' study generates new insights for innovation managers of gerontechnological enterprises about the innovation pathway.

This research enriches innovation management by integrating the linkage adaptation relationship among market, organization and technology factors; further research studies on the different configuration types suitable for different types of enterprises, as well as differentiated innovation pathways under the same configuration type, could contribute to the study on the innovation pathway under a premise of MOT.