ASSET LEVELS GROWING: In 2011, there was $12.4 billion in health savings accounts (HSAs) and health reimbursement arrangements (HRAs), spread across 8.4 million accounts, according to data from the 2011 EBRI/MGA Consumer Engagement in Health Care Survey, sponsored by EBRI and Matthew Greenwald & Associates. This is up from 2006, when there were 1.3 million accounts with $873.4 million in assets...

INTRODUCTION Our objectives were to examine the activities and circumstances associated with agricultural machine-related rollover fatalities. METHODS We identified agricultural machine rollover fatalities recorded by the Canadian Agricultural Injury Surveillance Program (CAISP) in 1990-2005. We determined sideways and backwards rollovers by year, age and sex of the victims, agricultural seas...

In addition to clean transportation and energy savings, electric vehicles can inherently offer better performance in the field of active safety and dynamic stability control, thanks to the superior fast and accurate control characteristics of electric motors. With the novel wheel status parameter TA for electric vehicles proposed by the authors in an earlier publication, a new TA index (TAI)-ba...

BACKGROUND Uncomfortable shoes have been attributed to poor fit and the cause of foot pathologies. Assessing and evaluating comfort and fit have proven challenging due to the subjective nature. The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between footwear characteristics and perceived comfort. METHODS Twenty-seven females assessed three different styles of ballet pump shoe for com...

Foot pathologies are common in nearly 80% of all elderly patients, and studies have indicated inappropriate footwear as one of the major underlying cause. It has been postulated that ill-fitting shoe wear affects plantar pressure, thus exacerbating weak balance. Complications arising from foot pathologies, which include difficulty in maintaining balance, have increased the risk of falls that ca...

Background The Peter James Centre (PJC) is the main rehabilitation hospital in Eastern Health. It provides a comprehensive inpatient and community rehabilitation programme. A Footwear Bank was established by the Podiatry Department in 2009 following an audit in 2007 that found 30% of the patients were not wearing suitable shoes to their therapy. The problem of finding suitable footwear had been...

This paper provides a roadmap of how mass customization can be applied to footware design. Particularly, the following questions are to be considered: What shoes are being customized in the market? Can you give more examples? What is the difference between a pair of “tailor-made” shoes with a mass customized one? What is the value derived from the footwear customization? What is the additional ...

OBJECTIVE Rollover crashes account for more than 33% of all motor vehicle-related fatalities and have the highest fatality risk of all crash types, at 1.37% in the United States. There is increased awareness of the high fatality rate associated with this crash type, but there is very limited pediatric-specific data related to rollover crashes in the United States. Recent focus on rollover mitig...

In this paper, we propose a system to assess the effect of footwear on the in-shoe plantar pressure and shear during gait. In our previous study, we developed a system for measuring the plantar pressure and shear inside footwear using specialized shoes and insoles with sensors. In this study, based on the previous study, 1) we realized a method to measure directly the in-shoe plantar pressure a...

In this paper, finite element analysis was used to compare the dynamic rollover performance of a midsized SUV with a strengthened roof in a Jordan Rollover System (JRS) test with an Un-Constrained (UC) rollover under the same initial conditions. The JRS has the ability to closely control the initial conditions of a vehicle being subjected to a rollover test. This research was proposed to study ...