OBJECTIVE Stair-riser banners are twice as effective as posters in encouraging stair climbing in shopping centres. This study tested the effectiveness of stair-riser banners in an English train station in 2006-2007. METHOD The train station had a 39-step staircase and an adjacent escalator. Baseline observations (3.5 weeks) were followed by 10.5 weeks of a banner intervention supplemented wit...

OBJECTIVE To examine using surface electromyography whether stair climbing with abdominal hollowing (AH) is better at facilitating local trunk muscle activity than stair climbing without AH. METHODS Twenty healthy men with no history of low back pain participated in the study. Surface electrodes were attached to the multifidus (MF), lumbar erector spinae, thoracic erector spinae, transverse a...

Enterprise storage clusters increasingly adopt erasure coding to protect stored data against transient and permanent failures. Existing erasure code designs not only introduce extra parity information in a storage-inefficient manner, but also consume substantial cross-rack recovery bandwidth. To relieve both storage and recovery burdens of erasure coding, we adapt our previously proposed STAIR ...

OBJECTIVE This study was a long-term survey of a stair climbing campaign that made use of point-of-choice prompts aimed at achieving exemplary behavior in citizens. METHODS The campaign began in September 2007 at the Kochi Prefectural Office. We monitored office workers who climbed the stairs or used the elevator in the prefectural office building, excluding weekends, from August 2007 through...

Wedge orthotics are commonly prescribed for patients with hyperpronation and/or low back pain to improve lower limb alignment and to reduce pain. The purpose of this study was to examine the kinetic effects of medial and lateral wedge orthotics during walking and stair negotiation. Twenty-two healthy young adults participated in the study. Each participant wore no wedge (W0) as a baseline and l...

BACKGROUND Accumulation of lifestyle physical activity is a current aim of health promotion, with increased stair climbing one public health target. While the workplace provides an opportunity for regular stair climbing, evidence for effectiveness of point-of-choice interventions is equivocal. This paper reports a new approach to worksite interventions, aimed at changing attitudes and, hence, b...

Previous interventions have successfully increased levels of stair climbing in public-access settings (e.g. malls). This study used robust methods to establish the magnitude of intervention effects among a specific target group-the overweight. Ascending stair/escalator users (N = 20 807) were observed in a mall. A 2-week baseline was followed by a 5-week intervention in which message banners, p...

OBJECTIVE This research examines whether Beijing residents are more or less likely than Montréal residents to avoid stair climbing, by replicating a study in Montréal, Canada that measured the impacts of distance between stairs and escalator, height between floors and pedestrian volume on stair climbing rate. METHOD 15 stairways, 14 up-escalators and 13 down-escalators were selected in 13 pub...

Stair-cases are useful environmental landmarks for navigation in mobility aids for the partially sighted. In this paper, a texture detection method using Gabor Filters is proposed to detect distant stair-cases. When close enough, stair-cases are then detected by looking for groups of concurrent lines, where convex and concave edges are partitioned using intensity variation information. Stair-ca...

In this paper, an algorithm for autonomous stair climbing with a tracked vehicle is presented. The proposed method achieves robust performance under real-world conditions, without assuming prior knowledge of the stair geometry, the dynamics of the vehicle’s interaction with the stair surface, or lighting conditions. The approach relies on fast and accurate estimation of the robot’s heading and ...