• Research in Community and Public Health Nursing
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.139-147
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• 2010

Purpose: This study was to find out knowledge, fear, and efficacy of fall in the community dwelling elderly and to investigate how the factors were connected to one another. Methods: Data were collected from June to August, 2009 from 101 aged people who aged 65 or older and agreed to participate in this study sampled among elders at 8 halls of the aged in local communities. The subjects were interviewed by a co-researcher and 3 trained assistants in a way of responding to the questionnaire after being read. The data were analyzed through t-test, ANOVA, Turkey's test and Pearson correlation coefficients. Results: Knowledge of fall was affected significantly by whether the living cost was provided or not, fear of fall was affected by sex, level of education, hearing impairment and regular exercise, and efficacy of fall was affected by age, sex, marital status, level of education, hearing impairment, vertigo and regular exercise. The results also showed a negative correlation between fear of fall and efficacy of fall. Conclusion: According to this study, regular exercise can build up knowledge and efficacy of fall and diminish fear of fall. Thus it is highly recommended to include regular exercise in an effective fall-prevention program.

• The Korean Journal of Rehabilitation Nursing
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.40-50
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• 2003

Purpose: To investigate audiometery and characteristics related to tinnitus in tinnitus patients, and to understand the relationship between the discomfort of tinnitus and the quality of life. Methods: The subjects were 110 patients with tinnitus. The data were collected using tinnitus handicap questionnaire, quality of life, and pure tone audiometry, which measured hearing level in dB and frequency in Hz matching of tinnitus. Results: Majority of tinnitus patients (75.5%~81.8%) had normal auditory sensation. but 82.7% of patients indicated that they have heard tinnitus "frequently" or "always", and the major sounds of tinnitus were "wing, wung, wang". The matching sounds of tinnitus had various range in hearing level(dB) and frequency(Hz). Tinnitus patients reported moderate levels of the discomfort of tinnitus and the quality of life, and there were negative correlation between the discomfort of tinnitus and the quality of life(r=-.314, p<.001). Conclusion: These findings suggest that special attention is needed for tinnitus patients because the physical, psychological, and social impacts of tinnitus could be decrease their quality of life. Specialized nursing intervention considering specific conditions related to tinnitus is required to solve various health problems of tinnitus patients.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.21-29
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• 2007

The necessity for improving the English listening ability of Korean learners has been emphasized since the ultimate goal of English education converted to CLT(Communicative Language Teaching) in Korea. Verbotonal Approach as an auditory-based strategy has been proved to be effective substantially in maximizing the listening skill of spoken foreign language. The purpose of this study is to find out an efficient way of improving listening ability for Korean middle school students by employing OFH(Optimal Frequency of Hearing) using Tonality Word Sentence Test, before & after using Listen II Verbotonal training unit based on VTS(Verbotonal System). The results of the listening tests showed that the listening ability of the subjects increased by 16.7% on the words and by 5.5% on the sentences after using Listen II, compared with before using Listen II and that the improvement rate of listening ability on the level of words is much higher than that on the level of sentences. From the results, we can come to a conclusion that training the listening skill with words in mid-tonality and low-tonality based on OFH might give a great positive effect in improving listening ability for Korean learners of English.

• Korean Journal of Social Welfare
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• v.45
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• pp.315-340
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• 2001

The purpose of study is to examine the effects of family support on the life satisfaction of elderly with disabilities and provide a ground necessary to improve it. Research was conducted on 167 elderly with hearing, visual and physical disabilities aged over 60 who were living in Seoul and Pusan. Telephone survey, sign language and interview, in accordance with types of disability, were adopted to collect data effectively. That is telephone survey was used for elderly with visual impairment whereas face-to-face interview for physical impairment and sign language for hearing impairment by volunteers. Collected data were analyzed, using hierarchical regression analysis. This study utilized two different models, direct effect model and buffering effect of social support in order to examine the effects of familial support on the life satisfaction of elderly with disabilities. Research findings suggest that the level of life satisfaction appeared to be low in general among elderly with disabilities and emotional family support exerted a positive effect on life satisfaction. In addition, it is empirically supported that emotional family support buffered the negative effect of economic limitations on life satisfaction. In other words, the effects of economic limitations as stress factor decreased with the increase in the frequency of emotional support, however, the level of life satisfaction decreased at a mercy of the stress factor of economic limitations with the decrease in the frequency of emotional support. Finally, this paper attempted to provide some alternatives to effectively improve life satisfaction among elderly with disabilities based on empirical findings.

• Journal of Computing Science and Engineering
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.40-50
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• 2012

Increase in the number of older people due to demographic changes poses great challenges to the social healthcare systems both in the Western and as well as in the Eastern countries. Support for older people by formal care givers leads to enormous temporal and personal efforts. Therefore, one of the most important goals is to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of today's care. This can be achieved by the use of assistive technologies. These technologies are able to increase the safety of patients or to reduce the time needed for tasks that do not relate to direct interaction between the care giver and the patient. Motivated by this goal, this contribution focuses on applications of acoustic technologies to support users and care givers in ambient assisted living (AAL) scenarios. Acoustic sensors are small, unobtrusive and can be added to already existing care or living environments easily. The information gathered by the acoustic sensors can be analyzed to calculate the position of the user by localization and the context by detection and classification of acoustic events in the captured acoustic signal. By doing this, possibly dangerous situations like falls, screams or an increased amount of coughs can be detected and appropriate actions can be initialized by an intelligent autonomous system for the acoustic monitoring of older persons. The proposed system is able to reduce the false alarm rate compared to other existing and commercially available approaches that basically rely only on the acoustic level. This is due to the fact that it explicitly distinguishes between the various acoustic events and provides information on the type of emergency that has taken place. Furthermore, the position of the acoustic event can be determined as contextual information by the system that uses only the acoustic signal. By this, the position of the user is known even if she or he does not wear a localization device such as a radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.20 no.9
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• pp.151-158
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• 2003

The impulse noise of bullet after shooting in small arms has an effect on the hearing ability of human. Although a silencer has been developed for noise reduction in small arms, there is only a few researches about relationships between the sound pressure level and the auditory sense of human. In this study, the quantitative sound pressure levels are revealed by experimental measurements of impulse noise with each silencer type. And the performance evaluation for noise suppression of a silencer in small arms is carried out to reduce a serious loss of the hearing ability of the small arms user. It is concluded that the evaluated results can be utilized for checking sound pressure and data accumulation for new small arms design with silencer.

• Transactions of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering
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• v.19 no.9
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• pp.928-934
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• 2009

Underwater impulsive sound such as underwater blasting noise, piling noise and stone breaking hammer affects marine animal hearing response and organs. This study describes the characteristics of various impulsive noise from waterfront construction site and their effect on fish. Time constant, peak pressure, energy and SEL(sound exposure level) of four different underwater impulsive sounds are quantified. Auditory and non-auditory tissue damage ranges are derived by comparing their quantities to the exposure criteria for fish. Damage ranges of auditory tissue and non-auditory tissue of underwater boring blast of 150 kg of charge, are about 100 m and 300 m, respectively. Other three impulsive sounds also gives damage effects but less than that of underwater boring blast.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
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• 2004.11a
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• pp.145-148
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• 2004

Until now, product mostly has revealed physical quantities created by the standpoint of engineers. Consumers, however, perceive and evaluate products on the non-physical characteristics, such as feelings, emotions, and experiences in different social and cultural situations. Especially, for the household appliances such as a refrigerator, the sound is heavily related to the satisfaction of a customer who is a real user of the product and is very important factor to decide purchasing as well as visual design. Therefore, in this research, not only the simple sound pressure level but also the consumer's sense of hearing evaluate the noise from the refrigerator. And also, in order to improve the quality of sound through the design change, the consumer's evaluation is analyzed and related to the engineering quantities.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.40 no.3
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• pp.75-80
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• 2019

Listening effort represents the listener's attention, stress, required cognition resource, and mental exertion to understand a speech in various situations. Recently, it has been focused to evaluate an effectiveness of hearing aids and cochlear implant. The physiologic measures, such as heart rate, skin conductance, electroencephalography, and pupil dilation, have been used to objectively measure listening effort. In this study, we investigated the feasibility of temporal and spectral heart rate variabilities to measure listening effort to understand speech in the presence of background noise. The results showed that several heart rate variabilities significantly increased as increasing background noise level. Finally, the heart rate variability can be used as an objective tool to measure listening efforts.

• Electronics and Telecommunications Trends
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• v.34 no.3
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• pp.1-12
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• 2019

In the digital era, broadcasting plays a very large role as a means of communication, as it no longer merely provides information or entertainment media. Particularly in the case of the visually and hearing-impaired, broadcasting is the primary means of acquiring information, so its role as a public service needs to be expanded. The development of digital technology enables the quantitative expansion of traditional methods of disability broadcasting, i.e., closed caption, sign language, and descriptive video service, with an acceptable level of quality. In this study, we review the current trends of, and concerns related to, broadcasting services for disabled people, as well as technological trends, and proposals for increasing visibility and accessibility to broadcasting for hearing-impaired people.