Shuping Xiong

Research on pre-impact fall detection with wearable inertial sensors (detecting fall accidents prior to body-ground impacts) has grown rapidly in the past decade due to its great potential for developing an on-demand fall-related injury prevention system. However, most researchers use their own datasets to develop fall detection algorithms and rarely make these datasets publicly available, which poses a challenge to fairly evaluate the performance of different algorithms on a common basis. Even

Although falls in older people are a major public health problem globally, to date there are scarce reports on socioeconomic risk factors for falls. The aim of the present study was to investigate the epidemiology of fall, its associated socioeconomic risk factors and relative importance among community-dwelling Korean elderly. Secondary analysis of national survey data with 31,684 community-dwelling Korean elderly was performed. Eleven socioeconomic factors (age, gender, household type, marital

The midfoot dorsal angle may be an appropriate metric for characterizing the foot arch because it is quick and easy to measure, without the tedious procedures associated with area calculations and dimension measurements.

Falls in the elderly is a major public health concern due to its high prevalence, serious consequences and heavy burden on the society. Many falls in older people happen within a very short time, which makes it difficult to predict a fall before it occurs and then to provide protection for the person who is falling. The primary objective of this study was to develop deep neural networks for predicting a fall during its initiation and descending but before the body impacts to the ground so that a

Footwear comfort is primarily determined by the fit between the foot and the shoe. Foot deformations that cannot be accommodated by the flexibility of the material of the shoe upper have to be dealt with by other adaptive means. The major purpose of this study was to determine foot deformations using nine foot dimensions—foot length, arch length, foot width, midfoot width, heel width, midfoot height, medial malleolus height of the most protruding point, lateral malleolus height of the most protr

The application of foot anthropometry to design good-fitting footwear has been difficult due to the lack of generalised models. This study seeks to model foot dimensions so that the characteristic shapes of feet, especially in the midfoot region, can be understood. Fifty Hong Kong Chinese adults (26 males and 24 females) participated in this study. Their foot lengths, foot widths, ball girths and foot heights were measured and then evaluated using mathematical models. The results showed that the

The industrial societies face difficulty applying traditional work-related musculoskeletal disorder (WMSD) risk assessment methods in practical applications due to in-situ task dynamics, complex data processing, and the need of ergonomics professionals. This study aims to develop and validate a wearable inertial sensors-based automated system for assessing WMSD risks in the workspace conveniently, in order to enhance workspace safety and improve workers' health. Both postural ergonomic analysis

Older people face difficulty engaging in conventional rehabilitation exercises for improving physical functions over a long time period due to the passive nature of the conventional exercise, inconvenience, and cost. This study aims to develop and validate a dynamic time warping (DTW) based algorithm for assessing Kinect-enabled home-based physical rehabilitation exercises, in order to support auto-coaching in a virtual gaming environment. A DTW-based algorithm was first applied to compute motio

Information related to reliable values of discomfort thresholds can help to improve the designs of various products. This study aimed to investigate the measurement reliabilities associated with pressure thresholds, while determining the effects of stimulus characteristics (stimulus area, indentation speed) of the human foot. An indentation apparatus was used with four sizes of indentation probes and three indentation speeds. In total, 13 locations on the right foot of 10 male and 10 female part

Many women wear high heeled shoes (HHS) to increase female attractiveness. This study shows that HHS induce more muscular effort and worse human standing balance and functional mobility, especially when heel height reaches 10 cm. HHS wearing experience only provides certain advantages to wearers on limits of stability in terms of larger maximum excursion and better directional control.