legs to assist walking and moving up-and-down stairs [1]. A control bar is attached to the robot waist to assist the aged person by stepping onto the feet of the robot. The robot “Zero Walker-1” [2] focused on ascending and descending stairs. An electric wheelchair named “iBOT” [3], capable of ascending and descending stairs and slopes was released by a Japanese company. In [4], a bipedal robot...

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVE While point-of-choice prompts consistently increase stair climbing, experimental comparisons of message content are rare. Here, the effects of 2 messages differing in complexity about the health outcomes obtainable from stair climbing were compared. METHODS In a UK train station with 2 independent platforms exited by identical 39-step staircases and adjacent escalators, o...

The purpose of this study was to examine the relative importance of physiological characteristics during firefighting performance, as assessed by the Candidate Physical Ability Test (CPAT). Subjects included career and volunteer firefighters aged 18-39 (N = 33). Upper- and lower-body strength, muscle endurance, lower body muscle power, body composition analysis, aerobic capacity, anaerobic fitn...

The number of elderly subjects requiring care is rapidly increasing, however, their health status has not been well studied. The purposes of this study were to describe the health characteristics of the elderly at home who were using long-term care insurance, and to clarify factors that influence dependence for activities of daily living (ADL). The subjects were 194 elderly people living at hom...

Dynamic knee kinematics were analyzed for medial osteoarthritic (OA) knees in three activities, including two types of maximum knee flexion. Continuous x-ray images of kneeling, squatting, and stair climbing motions were taken using a large flat panel detector. CT-derived bone models were used for the model registration-based 3D kinematic measurements. Three-dimensional joint kinematics and con...

Functional adaptation of the femur has been investigated in several studies by embedding bone remodelling algorithms in finite element (FE) models, with simplifications often made to the representation of bone's material symmetry and mechanical environment. An orthotropic strain-driven adaptation algorithm is proposed in order to predict the femur's volumetric material property distribution and...

Advances in surgical procedure, prosthesis design, and biomaterials performance have considerably increased the longevity of total joint replacements. Preoperative planning is another step in joint replacement that may have the potential to improve clinical outcome for the individual patient, but has remained relatively consistent for a long time. One means of advancing this aspect of joint rep...

BACKGROUND It is not clear whether recent increases in life expectancy are accompanied by a concurrent postponement of activity limitations. The objective of this study was to give best estimates of the trend in the prevalence of activity limitations among the non-institutionalized population aged 55-84 years over the period 1990-2007 in The Netherlands. METHODS We examined self-reports on 12...

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the gating of interlimb cutaneous reflexes is altered by holding an earth-referenced handrail during locomotion. In the first experiment, subjects performed locomotor tasks of varying difficulty (level walking, incline walking, and stair climbing) while lightly holding an earth-referenced rail. In the second experiment, the extent of rail con...

Background: Stair climbing is a part of the basic activities daily living. Previous biomechanical analyses stairs have been conducted in laboratory, resulting only few steps. Therefore, characteristics long stair real world remain unclear. The purpose this study was to identify differences kinematic and kinetic lower limb between beginning end phases an outdoor environment using wearable motion...