BACKGROUND Stair climbing helps to accumulate short bouts of physical activity throughout the day as a strategy for attaining recommended physical activity levels. There exists a need for effective long-term stair-climbing interventions that can be transferred to various worksite settings. The aims of this study were: 1) to evaluate short- and long-term effectiveness of a worksite stair-climbin...

Introduction There is no doubt that higher physical activity and fitness levels are inversely associated with the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) [1]. Yet, most Europeans and Americans do not meet current minimum physical activity recommendations [2] and the prevalence of CVD risk factors related to a sedentary lifestyle, such as obesity and diabetes, is increasing at an alarming rate [3,4...

BACKGROUND People with low back pain (LBP) alter their motion patterns during level walking and stair climbing due to pain or fear. However, the alternations of load sharing during the two activities are largely unknown. The objective of this study was to investigate the effect of LBP caused by lumbar disc herniation (LDH) on the muscle activities of 17 main trunk muscle groups and the intradis...

OBJECTIVES To study the training effects of eight weeks of stair climbing on Vo2max, blood lipids, and homocysteine in sedentary, but otherwise healthy young women. METHODS Fifteen women (mean (SD) age 18.8 (0.7) years) were randomly assigned to control (n = 7) or stair climbing (n = 8) groups. Stair climbing was progressively increased from one ascent a day in week 1 to five ascents a day in...

In this paper we examine whether a common perceptual parameter is available for guiding old adults, young adults and children in climbing the highest stair mountable in a bipedal fashion. Previous works have shown that the ratio between the height of the stair and the hip height was the body-scaled invariance adopted as information for selecting the highest stair by young adults [Journal of Exp...

This paper presents the design of a quadrupedal robot that can automatically adapt its gait to, and climb, staircases of different configurations. This is accomplished by endowing the robot with a parameterized gait for stair climbing: First, a gait plan is synthesized that allows the robot to climb a stair of known dimensions. Second, the robot approaches a previously unseen stair and perceive...

This paper focuses on the stair-climbing problem for a tracked robot. The tracked robot designed in this paper has the ability to explore stairs in an unknown indoor environment, climbing up and down the stairs, keeping balance while climbing, and successfully landing on the stair platform. Intelligent algorithms are proposed to explore and align stairs, and a fuzzy controller is introduced to ...

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 ...

[Purpose] This study investigated the effects of gait time and trunk acceleration ratio in old-old adult females during stair climbing. [Subjects and Methods] Twenty-five older adult females who were able to walk independently volunteered for this study and were categorized into two age groups (older adults or old-old adults). Gait time and trunk acceleration ratio were measured using an accele...

Stair climbing is one of the most challenging tasks for vehicles, especially when transporting people and heavy loads. Although many solutions have been proposed demonstrated in practice, it necessary to further improve their ability safety. This paper presents a systematic review scientific engineering stair literature, providing brief descriptions mechanism method operation highlighting advan...