• 대한인간공학회지
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• 제12권1호
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• pp.3-15
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• 1993

The pressure distribution between human body and seat surface has been considered as an important factor affecting seating comfort. However, it is rare to find general guidelines of how to analyze these pressure patterms related to the seating comfort. In order to investigate the relationship between the pressure patterns and the subjective feeling of seating comfort, a high-resolution body pressure measurement system was adopted. The measured patterns showed that the clear distinctions between the comfortable seats. It was also possible to estimate the seating comfort based upon the analysis of the pressure patterns. The further research will be focused on finding out the relationship between physical seat design parameters and the seating discomfort.

• 대한인간공학회지
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• 제33권5호
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• pp.407-422
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• 2014

Objective: The purpose of the study is to develop quantitative usability evaluation criteria for senior-friendly autonomous transportation robot. Background: The Republic of Korea has become the most rapidly aging society, and is anticipated to enter the post-aged society in 2026. To raise the quality of life of a senior with limited mobility and to reduce the burden of caregivers, many high-tech assistive products with information technologies are developed nowadays. The senior-friendly autonomous transportation robot is one person robot vehicle to move a senior to the destination for hospitals, nursing homes or silver town complex. With built-in navigation system and environmental monitoring censors, it automatically seeks the path to the destination and avoids collision to obstacles and pedestrians on the way. Due to the early stage of the product, few usability studies in this field have been done, mostly on general service robots to assist seniors, power wheelchairs and delivery robots. ISO and KS standards for the service robots are focused on safety. Method: Based on the reference usability index, the early draft of the usability evaluation questionnaires was developed. After small group tests and interviews, the experts modified the initial draft to the Usability Evaluation Criteria for Senior-Friendly Autonomous Transportation Robot (UEC-SFATR). Result: UEC-SFATR consisted of 4 subscales - Safety, Controllability, Efficiency and Satisfaction. All of the 4 subscales of UEC-SFATR were passed the reliability criteria by 4 groups of seniors, divided by gender and familiarity of smart-devices. Conclusion: UEC-SFATR covers wider area of user experiences of the SFATR and is a good measurement tool to help both the users and developers of the robot. Application: This study provides guide to the future product development and product competitiveness evaluation by quantifying user experiences for the SFATR.

• 대한인간공학회지
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• 제25권3호
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• pp.85-96
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• 2006

Main control room(MCR) man-machine interface(MMI) design of advanced nuclear power plants(NPPs) such as APR(advanced power reactor)-1400 can be validated through performance-based tests to determine whether it acceptably supports safe operation of the plant. In this work, plant performance, personnel task, situation awareness, workload, teamwork, and anthropometric/physiological factor are considered as factors for the human performance evaluation. For development of measures in each of the factors, techniques generally used in various industries and empirically proven to be useful are adopted as main measures and some helpful techniques are developed in order to complement the main measures. Also the development of the measures is addressed based on the theoretical background. Finally we discuss the way in which the measures can be effectively integrated and then HUPESS(HUman Performance Evaluation Support System) which is in development based on the integrated way is briefly introduced.

• 대한인간공학회지
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• 제16권3호
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• pp.1-10
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• 1997

This paper is concerned with the development and evaluation of the camera calibration method for a real-time head tracking system. Tracking of head movements is important in the design of an eye-controlled human/computer interface and the area of virtual environment. We proposed a video-based head tracking system. A camera was mounted on the subject's head and it took the front view containing eight 3-dimensional reference points(passive retr0-reflecting markers) fixed at the known position(computer monitor). The reference points were captured by image processing board. These points were used to calculate the position (3-dimensional) and orientation of the camera. A suitable camera calibration method for providing accurate extrinsic camera parameters was proposed. The method has three steps. In the first step, the image center was calibrated using the method of varying focal length. In the second step, the focal length and the scale factor were calibrated from the Direct Linear Transformation (DLT) matrix obtained from the known position and orientation of the camera. In the third step, the position and orientation of the camera was calculated from the DLT matrix, using the calibrated intrinsic camera parameters. Experimental results showed that the average error of camera positions (3- dimensional) is about $0.53^{\circ}C$, the angular errors of camera orientations are less than $0.55^{\circ}C$and the data aquisition rate is about 10Hz. The results of this study can be applied to the tracking of head movements related to the eye-controlled human/computer interface and the virtual environment.

• 대한인간공학회지
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• 제31권6호
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• pp.757-764
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• 2012

Objective: The aim of this study is to find the optimal values of sliding factors which influence the mechanical emotion of users when they use sliding type mobile phones. Background: There are various researches that study the emotion of using mobile phones. They focus the correlation between emotion words and design factors and use the commercial products by the subjects in the experiment. However, it has a limit in finding the optimal point of emotional factors because we can search the restricted values in the mass production of the products. Therefore, we will find the optimal points by realizing the full range of the user's mechanical emotion. Method: First, we need to get the detailed factors which can describe the mechanical emotion in sliding up and down the mobile phone. Next, we find the control factors by considering the correlation between the factors of the sliding emotion and the possibility of quantitative design. To find the optimal points on the control factors, we make a sliding evaluation system which can help users feel the sliding mechanical emotion by realizing control factors. Finally, we find the optimal points by doing the experiment the system being used. Results: The critical values of the factors which are the main variables of this study are Open Max Force and Dead point Ratio. The optimal point of the Open Max Force is 200~250g/f, and the Dead point Ratio is 40~50%. Conclusion: In this study we develop the sliding evaluation system to realize the control factors of the sliding type phone and find the optimal values of the critical factors. Application: The results can be used as the criteria for designing sliding type phone.

• 대한인간공학회:학술대회논문집
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• 대한인간공학회 1995년도 춘계학술대회논문집
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• pp.16-22
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• 1995

The importance of usability evaluation is increasing in developing a new system and product. The current approaches for usability evaluation are: the comparative evaluation to measure usability, and the iterative user interface design to find usability problems. This paper pressents three types of characteristics and a set of criteria for usability evaluation. The methodology for criteria-based quantitative analysis of user interface usability is investigated with a view to measuring usability. The fuzzy weighted-checklist method with linguistic variables is used for quantitatie analysis. This analysis provides a quantitative measure, which reflects the degree of excellence of user interface usability during the design and development phases.

• 대한인간공학회지
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• 제21권3호
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• pp.13-24
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• 2002

Reduction and prevention of human error is one of the major interests for the enhancement of system safety and availability in Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs). As human beings have become the weak point in the system safety, a systematic evaluation on human performance during emergency situation should be performed in advance to identify the potential vulnerability of human tasks. Though the data gathering and analysis from real field is an important precondition, there were no available data in nuclear field of korea. This paper presents the result of human performance analysis on emergency tasks in NNPs. Firstly, a task analysis was performed to identify the characteristics of operator tasks during emergency condition and to classify them into a set of generic emergency tasks. Secondly, simulation data were collected and analyzed for the emergency tasks using the full scope simulator of Younggwang NPPs. The analyzed human performance information cover the event diagnosis time, the execution time of each procedural step, observation parameters, typer of irrelevant response, pattern of communication among staffs, and so on. These performance data would be used for human reliability analysis and the research of human error as technical bases.

• 대한인간공학회지
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• 제18권1호
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• pp.133-147
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• 1999

Traffic signs without a cognitive consideration in their design may cause information-processing problem that could result in a mental confusion among drivers often lead to a serious traffic accident. Therefore, in this study, several traffic signs currently used in Seoul Metropolitan area have been sampled and analyzed to identify design problems that usually caused by neglecting drivers cognitive ability. To classify the practical design problems, five major information-processing problems have been suggested: indistinguishable information, information conflict, missing information, sign-load mismatch, and information overload. In order to solve these cognitive problems, new traffic signs have been suggested in this study. An experiment was also performed to validate the new traffic sign. Twenty-four healthy subjects participated in the experiment. They were asked to answer the Question after observing the traffic signs continuously displayed on computer screen. The result indicated that subjects improved the accuracy in understanding the signs by 1.4 times when they used the suggested traffic sign compared to the old one. Based upon the results, a cognitive guideline was suggested for correct and speedy reading of traffic signs by improving information processing and reducing of human error. In conclusion, the traffic sign may well be applied to design an intelligent traffic sign system to increase the safety and comfort of drivers, especially in complex load condition.

• 대한인간공학회지
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• 제29권6호
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• pp.831-841
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• 2010

Usability evaluation of physical products involves characterizing complex physical interactions between humans and products. Human models known as manikins have been widely utilized as usability evaluation tools for automobile interior package design. When combined with computer-aided design software programs, such manikins can be used to simulate driving postures and evaluate driver-interior fits early in the design process, and therefore, may greatly facilitate achieving high-quality design in a cost-efficient manner. The purpose of this study was to define a set of manikins for designing automobile interior packages for the South Korean male population. These manikins were conceptualized as "boundary" manikins, which represent individuals lacking in certain physical capacities or having usability-related issues (e.g., an individual with the 5th percentile forward reach capability, an individual with the 95th percentile shoulder width). Such boundary manikins can serve as an efficient tool for determining if an automobile interior design accommodates the majority of the population. The boundary manikins were selected from the large sample of Korean males whose anthropometric dimensions were described in the recent Size Korea anthropometric database. For each male in the database, his comfortable driving posture was represented using a kinematic body linkage model and various physical capacity measured and usability-related characteristics relevant to driver accommodation were evaluated. For each such measure, a boundary manikin was selected among the Korean males. The manikins defined in this study are expected to serve as tools for ergonomic design of automobile interior packages. The manikin selection method developed in this study was implemented as a generic software program useful for various product design applications.

• 대한인간공학회지
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• 제30권1호
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• pp.99-108
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• 2011

Almost all companies have paid much attention to the safety management ranging from maintenance to operation even at the stage of designing in order to prevent accidents, but fatal accidents continue to increase throughout the world. In particular, it is essential to systematically prevent such fatal accidents as fire, explosion or leakage of toxic gas at factories in order to not only protect the workers and neighbors but also prevent economic losses and environmental pollution. Though it is well known that accident probability is very low in NPP(Nuclear Power Plants), the reason why many researches are still being performed about the accidents is the results may be so severe. HRA is the main process to make preparation for possibility of human error in designing of the NPP. But those techniques have some problems and limitation as follows; the evaluation sensitivity of those techniques are out of date. And the evaluation of human error is not coupled with the design process. Additionally, the scope of the human error which has to be included in reliability assessment should be expanded. This work focuses on the coincidence of human error and mechanical failure for some important performance shaping factors to propose a method for improving safety effectively of the process industries. In order to apply in these purposes into the thesis, I found 63 critical Performance Shaping Factors of the eight dimensions throughout studies that I executed earlier. In this study, various analysis of opinion of specialists(Personal Factors, Training, Knowledge or Experience, Procedures and Documentation, Information, Communications, HMI, Workplace Design, Quality of Environment, Team Factors) and the guideline for construction of PSF were accomplished. The selected method was AHP which simplifies objective conclusions by maintaining consistency. This research focused on the implementation process of PSF to evaluate the process of PSF at each phase. As a result, we propose an evaluation model of PSF as a tool to find critical problem at each phase and improve on how to resolve the problems found at each phase. This evaluation model makes it possible to extraction of PSF succesfully by presenting the basis of assessment which will be used by enterprises to minimize the trial and error of construction process of PSF.