[Purpose] The aim of this study was to examine the the effects of hippotherapy on gait and balance ability in patients with stroke. [Subjects and Methods] Thirty stroke patients were randomly divided into a hippotherapy group and a treadmill group and they conducted exercise for eight weeks. [Results] Berg Balance Scale score, gait velocity, and step length asymmetry ratio were significantly improved in the group receiving hippotherapy training. However, in the group receiving treadmill training, only step length asymmetry ratio was significantly improved. In the comparison between the hippotherapy group and treadmill group, there was no significant difference in Berg Balance Scale score, but a significant difference was found in gait velocity and step length asymmetry ratio. [Conclusion] The results of this study indicated that hippotherapy is a helpful treatment for stroke patients.

With the increase in demand for ad hoc networks, localization has become a fundamental and essential solution to manage networks. Among existing localization algorithms, DV-Hop algorithm can estimate the location of nodes using the estimated distance of nodes without any additional devices to measure range information. However, DV-Hop is not accurate in estimating the geographic location of nodes because the average size for one hop is calculated without considering the positioning error and the path configuration between nodes. In this paper, a novel algorithm based on DV-Hop algorithm is proposed for the approach to estimating the average size of a hop by minimizing anchor's positioning error using Least Squares Estimation with other anchors. Moreover, unknown nodes have their own average hop size for one hop to alleviate the location error of the unknown occurring as more than the minimum hop count for the distance. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the DV-Hop algorithm in location estimation.

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