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The purpose of this paper is to solve the social pathological problems through the application of scientific and systematic training methods in response to the demand for improvement of muscular strength of elderly people. It is expected that it will be used as the evaluation, strengthening of muscular function, and rehabilitation exercise program through the provision of exercise information and training program. This paper introduces exercise equipment for the muscular strength of elderly, which provides measurement data and training programs. Though control module and training information module, training load is controlled for safety and effective exercise.

Pachymic acid (PA) is a lanostane-type triterpenoid derived from Poria cocos mushroom that possess various biological effects such as anti-cancer, antiinflammatory and anti-metastasis effects. In this study, we investigated the anti-cancer effects of PA in EJ bladder cancer cells. The results showed that PA significantly inhibited proliferation of EJ cells in a dose-dependent manner. PA induced accumulation of sub-G1 DNA content (apoptotic cell population), apoptotic bodies and chromatin condensation and DNA fragmentation in EJ cells in a dose-dependent manner. PA also induces activation of caspase-3, -8 and -9, and subsequent cleavage of poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase, and significantly suppressed the inhibitor of apoptosis protein family proteins in a dose-dependent manner. Furthermore, PA activates Bid and induced the loss of mitochondrial membrane potential (ΔΨm ) with up-regulated pro-apoptotic proteins (Bax and Bad), down-regulated anti-apoptotic proteins (Bcl-2 and Bcl-xL) and cytochrome c release. In turn, PA increased the generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS); also, the ROS production was blocked by N-acetyl-L-cysteine. The expressions of TNF-related apoptosis inducing ligand and death receptor 5 were up-regulated by PA in a dose-dependent manner, suggesting extrinsic pathway also involved in PA-induced apoptosis. This study provides evidence that PA might be useful in the treatment of human bladder cancer.

Pachymic acid (PA) is a lanostane-type triterpenoid derived from the Poria cocos mushroom. Several beneficial biological features of PA provide medicine with a wide variety of valuable effects, such as anticancer and anti-inflammatory activity; it also has antioxidant effects against oxidative stress. Nonetheless, the biological properties and mechanisms that produce this anti-cancer action of PA remain largely undetermined. In this study, we investigated the pro-apoptotic effects of PA in T24 human bladder cancer cells. It was found that PA could inhibit the cell growth of T24 cells in a dose-dependent manner, which was associated with the induction of apoptotic cell death, as evidenced by the formation of apoptotic bodies and chromatin condensation and accumulation of cells in the sub-G1 phase. The induction of apoptotic cell death by PA was connected with an up-regulation of pro-apoptotic Bax and Bad protein expression and down-regulation of anti-apoptotic Bcl-2 and Bcl-xL proteins, and inhibition of apoptosis family proteins. In addition, apoptosis-inducing concentrations of PA induced the activation of caspase-9, an initiator caspase of the mitochondrial-mediated intrinsic pathway, and caspase-3, accompanied by proteolytic degradation of poly (ADP-ribose)-polymerase. PA also induced apoptosis via a death receptor-mediated extrinsic pathway by caspase-8 activation, resulting in the truncation of Bid and suggesting the existence of cross-talk between the extrinsic and intrinsic pathways. Taken together, the present results suggest that PA may be a potential chemotherapeutic agent for the control of human bladder cancer cells.

A new type of high precision electromagnetic suspension (EMS) which can support heavy tray along long stroke rail is proposed in this paper. Compared with the conventional EMS, the suggested moving-core typed EMS has the levitation electromagnets (EMs) on the fixed rail. This scheme has high load capability caused by iron-core and enables simple tray structure. Also it does not have precision degradation caused by heat generation from EMs, which is a drawback of conventional EMS. With these merits, the proposed EMS can be an optimal contactless linear bearing in next generation flat panel display (FPD) manufacturing process if the ability of long stroke movement is proved. So a special Section Switching Algorithm (SSA) is derived from the resultant force and moment equations of the levitated tray which enables long stroke movement of the tray. In order to verify the feasibility of the suggested SSA, a simple test-setup of the EMS with 2 Section-changes is made up and servo-controlled in the simulation and experiment. The simulation shows the perfect changeover the EMs, and the experiment shows overall control performance of under ±40 μm gap deviations. These results reveal that the newly suggested contactless linear bearing can simultaneously achieve high load capability and precision gap control as well as long stroke.

A motion of a robot manipulator under environment for human and robot to coexist should be able to quickly sense external force and react for minimizing a damage due to physical contacts. In the absence of sensing external force, relative motions between robot and human are not predictable and unexpected collisions may occur at some position during motion of the robot arm. This paper proposes a real-time collision detection method and a compliance control based on detecting abnormal current value to minimize an impact force at the moment of collision between service robot arm and unknown obstacle. In the introduced method, the extra sensors such as the Force/Toque sensor or the visual sensor to detect the collision are not necessary. Instead of these sensors, the collision detection and the safety motion are achieved by a simple method based on the current characteristics in according to operating of each joint motor of robot manipulator. In order to evaluate the performance for minimizing an impact force, the proposed method is applied to the developed light weight robot arm for a service robot.

This paper proposes lane recognition algorithm using lane prominence technique to extract lane candidate. The lane prominence technique is combined with embossing effect, lane thickness check, and lane extraction using mask. The proposed lane recognition algorithm consists of preprocessing, lane candidate extraction and lane recognition. First, preprocessing is executed, which includes gray image acquisition, inverse perspective transform and gaussian blur. Second, lane candidate is extracted by using lane prominence technique. Finally, lane is recognized by using hough transform and least square method. To evaluate the proposed lane recognition algorithm, this algorithm was applied to the detection of lanes in the rainy and night day. The experiment results showed that the proposed algorithm can recognize lane in various environment. It means that the algorithm can be applied to lane recognition to drive unmanned vehicles.

In this paper, an evaluation system for verifying algorithm of unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV) control and self-localization in GPS-denied environments, instead of the Vicon motion capture system that is being widely used as ground truth of the quadcopter position control, is developed and its feasibility evaluated. Among the RGB-D cameras that can make 3D measurements, Kinect is used and validated by applying the algorithm to a linear robot, which then chooses a marker and recognizes it. The marker recognition algorithm comprises two parts. First, a background extraction technique is utilized to establish the area of interest; next, a filter that adopts the labeling technique is used to recognize a marker in the region of interest. The feasibility of the algorithm is validated in an actual experiment employing two kinds of quadcopters.