There are an estimated 1.7 million Americans living with limb loss; further, spinal cord injuries afflict 250,000 Americans [1]. Many patients lose their jobs and their quality of life plummets. Fortunately there have been significant advancements in the design of prosthetic limbs in the last few decades. A noteworthy achievement is the direct integration of a prosthetic device with the brain, ...

Bipedal walking has been demonstrated through physical and computer simulations by McGeer [1] to be possible without actuation or control within a range of shallow slopes. Results from such passive dynamic walkers have led many researchers to believe the mechanics of walking should be understood, in addition to the activation and control issues, for biped locomotion to be realized. Recent work ...

There exists a class of two-legged machines for which walking is a natural dynamic mode: Once started on a shallow slope, such a machine will settle into a steady gait quite comparable to human walking, without active control or energy input. Interpretation and analysis of the underlying physics is straighgorward; the walking cycle, its stability, and sensitivity to parameter variations are eas...

OBJECTIVE Here we describe the epidemiologic characteristics and secular trends of infant walker-related injuries among children who are younger than 15 months in the United States. METHODS A retrospective analysis was conducted of data from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System of the US Consumer Product Safety Commission, 1990-2001. Sample weights that were provided by the Nati...

Ensuring mobility of the elderly is an important task in our aging society. To this end, this paper presents SMARTWALKER, a high-tech extension of a regular walker that aims to navigate around its environment autonomously and assist its user intelligently. The walker is equipped with sensors and actuators and operates in two modes, autonomous and assistive. In the autonomous mode, the walker ac...

A hierarchical framework is proposed to address the issues of modeling different type of words in keyword spotting (KWS). Keyword models are built at various levels according to the availability of training set resources for each individual word. The proposed approach improves the performance of KWS even when no training speech is available for the keywords. It also suggests an easier way to co...