Elderly persons often use a cane to walk; therefore, it plays an important role in their daily life (Kuan et al., 1999;Liu et al, 2011). Conventionally, straight-type canes are widely used. The cane has to be lightweight and made of high stiffness material to ensure usability and safety. Straight-type canes have adjustable lengths and are very portable owing to their light weight. These canes are lightweight because of the uniform hollow section in them. In addition to structure, material selection is important for realizing the lightweight and high stiffness characteristics of the cane. Owing to the ease of production, aluminum and wood are widely used as materials (Mully, 1988). Carbon fibers, which are lighter than aluminum, are also popular.Straight-type canes can be produced in huge quantities, but their shape design is rarely discussed (Jones et al., 2008;Li and Chou, 2014). Because the cane is subjected to an impact load from the ground, a curved design is preferable for relaxing the impact load. However, no such shape design exists. Shape optimization using the traction method (Azegami and Wu, 1996) is an effective approach to determine the cane shape under impact loads, but a large number of numerical simulations are required. In addition, the method is generally valid for single objective design optimization, but there are
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