• Fiber Technology and Industry
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• v.2 no.4
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• pp.490-508
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• 1998

One of the latest fields of research in the area of output devices is tactual display devices [13,31]. These tactual or haptic devices allow the user to receive haptic feedback output from a variety of sources. This allows the user to actually feel virtual objects and manipulate them by touch. This is an emerging technology and will be instrumental in enhancing the realism of wearable augmented environments for certain applications. Tactual displays have previously been used for scientific visualization in virtual environments by chemists and engineers to improve perception and understanding of force fields and of world models populated with the impenetrable. In addition to tactual displays, the use of wearable audio displays that allow sound to be spatialized are being developed. With wearable computers, designers will soon be able to pair spatialized sound to virtual representations of objects when appropriate to make the wearable computer experience even more realistic to the user. Furthermore, as the number and complexity of wearable computing applications continues to grow, there will be increasing needs for systems that are faster, lighter, and have higher resolution displays. Better networking technology will also need to be developed to allow all users of wearable computers to have high bandwidth connections for real time information gathering and collaboration. In addition to the technology advances that make users need to wear computers in everyday life, there is also the desire to have users want to wear their computers. In order to do this, wearable computing needs to be unobtrusive and socially acceptable. By making wearables smaller and lighter, or actually embedding them in clothing, users can conceal them easily and wear them comfortably. The military is currently working on the development of the Personal Information Carrier (PIC) or digital dog tag. The PIC is a small electronic storage device containing medical information about the wearer. While old military dog tags contained only 5 lines of information, the digital tags may contain volumes of multi-media information including medical history, X-rays, and cardiograms. Using hand held devices in the field, medics would be able to call this information up in real time for better treatment. A fully functional transmittable device is still years off, but this technology once developed in the military, could be adapted tp civilian users and provide ant information, medical or otherwise, in a portable, not obstructive, and fashionable way. Another future device that could increase safety and well being of its users is the nose on-a-chip developed by the Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee. This tiny digital silicon chip about the size of a dime, is capable of 'smelling' natural gas leaks in stoves, heaters, and other appliances. It can also detect dangerous levels of carbon monoxide. This device can also be configured to notify the fire department when a leak is detected. This nose chip should be commercially available within 2 years, and is inexpensive, requires low power, and is very sensitive. Along with gas detection capabilities, this device may someday also be configured to detect smoke and other harmful gases. By embedding this chip into workers uniforms, name tags, etc., this could be a lifesaving computational accessory. In addition to the future safety technology soon to be available as accessories are devices that are for entertainment and security. The LCI computer group is developing a Smartpen, that electronically verifies a user's signature. With the increase in credit card use and the rise in forgeries, is the need for commercial industries to constantly verify signatures. This Smartpen writes like a normal pen but uses sensors to detect the motion of the pen as the user signs their name to authenticate the signature. This computational accessory should be available in 1999, and would bring increased peace of mind to consumers and vendors alike. In the entertainment domain, Panasonic is creating the first portable hand-held DVD player. This device weight less than 3 pounds and has a screen about 6' across. The color LCD has the same 16:9 aspect ratio of a cinema screen and supports a high resolution of 280,000 pixels and stereo sound. The player can play standard DVD movies and has a hour battery life for mobile use. To summarize, in this paper we presented concepts related to the design and use of wearable computers with extensions to smart spaces. For some time, researchers in telerobotics have used computer graphics to enhance remote scenes. Recent advances in augmented reality displays make it possible to enhance the user's local environment with 'information'. As shown in this paper, there are many application areas for this technology such as medicine, manufacturing, training, and recreation. Wearable computers allow a much closer association of information with the user. By embedding sensors in the wearable to allow it to see what the user sees, hear what the user hears, sense the user's physical state, and analyze what the user is typing, an intelligent agent may be able to analyze what the user is doing and try to predict the resources he will need next or in the near future. Using this information, the agent may download files, reserve communications bandwidth, post reminders, or automatically send updates to colleagues to help facilitate the user's daily interactions. This intelligent wearable computer would be able to act as a personal assistant, who is always around, knows the user's personal preferences and tastes, and tries to streamline interactions with the rest of the world.

• International journal of advanced smart convergence
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• v.5 no.3
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• pp.32-39
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• 2016

With the help of a small wearable device, patients reside in an isolated village need constant monitoring which may increase access to care and decrease healthcare delivery cost. As the number of patients' requests increases in simultaneously manner, the web service gateway located in the village hall encounters limitations for performing them successfully and concurrently. The gateway based RESTful technology responsible for handling patients' requests attests an internet latency in case a large number of them submit toward the gateway increases. In this paper, we propose the design tasks of the web service gateway for handling concurrency events. In the procedure of designing tasks, concurrency is best understood by employing multiple levels of abstraction. The way that is eminently to accomplish concurrency is to build an object-oriented environment with support for messages passing between concurrent objects. We also investigate the performance of event-driven architecture for building web service gateway using node.js. The experiments results show that server-side JavaScript with Node.js and MongoDB as database is 40% faster than Apache Sling. With Node.js developers can build a high-performance, asynchronous, event-driven healthcare hub server to handle an increasing number of concurrent connections for Remote Healthcare Monitoring System in an isolated village with no access to local medical care.

• Journal of Korean Biological Nursing Science
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.271-278
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• 2020

Purpose: This study was performed to identify the risk factors for oral mucosa pressure ulcer development in intubated patients in adult intensive care unit. Methods: Comparative descriptive study design using prospective observational design and medical record review was used. The inclusion criteria of case was that a) patients of 18 years in their age, b) patients with endotracheal tube. Data of 34 patients were analysed. Descriptive statistics, chi-square test, Fisher's exact test, Mann-whitney test, Spearman's rho correlation coefficients, and multiple logistic regression analysis were used. Resampling methods such as bootstrap was used in this study because of small number of patients. Results: Oral mucosa pressure ulcer developed in 44.1% of the intubated patients. The risk factors of oral mucosa pressure ulcer were steroid use, biteblock use and serum albumin level. Compared to the non-user of steroid, user of steroid had 32.59 times (95% CI: 1.47-722.44) higher risk of developing oral mucosa pressure ulcer. The user of biteblock had 18.78 times (95% CI: 1.00-354.40) and albumin level had 0.03 times (95% CI: 0.00-0.80) higher risk of oral mucosa pressure ulcer incidence. Conclusion: Based on the results of this study, tailored pressure relief strategies considering sex and therapeutic condition should be provided to decrease oral mucosa pressure ulcer.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.37 no.6
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• pp.215-221
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• 2016

Conformity between the femoral component and tibial insert within the knee replacement may be measured in frontal or sagittal view, and shows differences in the curvature radius of the femoral component depending on the flexion angle, i.e., curvature radius has a complex effect on contact stress. Therefore, it is essential to confirm how the curvature radius effects contact stress, and provide an important variable to reduce contact stress. This study correlated contact stress with curvature radius measured in frontal and the sagittal views and confirmed the effect of curvature radius for assessment of the Newly Designed Unicompartment Knee Replacement (NDUKR). Finite element models were constructed for NDUKR and $Zimmer^{(R)}$ Unicompartment High Flex Knee Replacement system (ZUKR), incorporating the curvature radius as measured in either frontal or sagittal view. The femoral component had 1200N of compressive load applied approximately 1.65xbody weight. Contact stress was predicted at flexion angles $0^{\circ}C$, $30^{\circ}C$, $60^{\circ}C$, $90^{\circ}C$ and $120^{\circ}C$, for NDUKR: 42, 47.7, 47.7, 51.2, and 54.1 MPa, and ZUKR: 41.2, 49.5, 53.2, 54.3, and 57.4 MPa, respectively. Correlation analysis showed the influence of curvature radius measured from the sagittal view was larger than for frontal view.

• The Korean Journal of Pain
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.170-178
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• 1997

Background: The analgesic efficacy and safety of propacetamol, an injectable prodrug of acetoaminophen, in combination with intravenous morphine PCA were studied in 40 patients after gynecological surgery requiring lower abdominal incision. Methods: Using a double-blind, randomized, parallel-group design, the effects of four(every 6 hr) intravenous injections of 2 g propacetamol(=1 g acetoaminophen) were compared with four injections of placebo(PL) immediately after surgery. Efficacy of cumulative dose of morphine and number of boluses requested was assessed over 24 hours by automated recording on the PCA device. It was assessed on pain scores rated on a ten-point verbal scale along with vital signs, $K^+$, glucose, BUN, creatinine, PT and PTT were measured along with stress hormones(epinephrine, norepinephrine and cortisol). Results: There were no differences in demographic data between two groups. Propacetamol group demonstrated approximately 21% morphine sparing effect compared to placebo group($33.1{\pm}10.4$ mg vs $41.4{\pm}8.0$ mg). No significant differences noted in $K^+$, glucose, BUN, Creatinine, PT and PTT levels. There were significant increases in norepinephrine and cortisol in placebo group postoperatively, compared to preoperative values. At the same time, propacetamol group also showed significant changes in these hormones. Both group revealed high degree of patient satisfaction. Conclusion: Propacetamol showed significant morphine sparing effect to some degree. Side effects were much less in propacetamol group with subsequently high patient satisfaction. The secretion of stress hormone were not blocked by postoperative propacetamol injections. Authors concluded that propacetamol should be considered as an excellent adjuvant analgesics in postoperative pain control in opioid patient controlled analgesia.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.10 no.4 s.36
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• pp.29-36
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• 2005

As computing environments are more rapidly developed, an adaptive and intelligent services using post PC such as PDA. Laptop, and Tablet PC in case of rounding and examining patients are highly demanded. The objective of this study is to design and implement a context-awareness support system based on voice service for medical environments. To achieve it, we propose a context middleware which plays an important role in recognizing a client with PDA by using a Bluetooth wireless communication technology as well as in executing an appropriate execution module, like delivery for diagnosis information of patients, according to the staff's context acquired from a context server. In addition, the context server functions as a manager that efficiently stores context information such as client's current status, physical environment, and device resources into a database server. Finally, for verifying the usefulness of the proposed system, we develop an application system which provides voice playing services for notification of other physicians through our context middleware.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2017.10a
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• pp.477-479
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• 2017

With the recent advances in medical technology and health care, the prevention and treatment of diseases has developed. Accordingly aging has rapidly progressed. In this life span and aging society, demand for diagnostic centered medical care is increasing rapidly. In this paper, we propose a wearable patient check system based on FPGA that can be controlled by sensors. In the existing hospital, a doctor or nurse visited the patient every hour to check the condition. However, in this paper, patients, doctors and nurses can check the patient's condition at the desired time using patient check system. In addition, the tilt sensor is used for the patient who is uncomfortable to easily control. The proposed FPGA-based hardware architecture consists of an algorithm for enlarged image processing, a TFT-LCD Controller, a CIS Controller, and a Memory Controller to output the patient's status image. Implemented and validated using the DE2-115 test board with Cyclone IV EP4CE115F29C7 FPGA device and its operating frequency is 50MHz.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.19 no.11
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• pp.344-349
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• 2018

This paper proposes a method of designing the main parameters of the Teflon coating equipment of a guide wire used in medical treatment. The proposed device was designed to be guided by a reel-to-reel method in which the guide wire performs all processes continuously, such as Teflon coating and heat treatment. At this time, the conveyed guide wire vibrates between the rollers, which affects the quality of the coating. Therefore, this paper proposes a dynamic equation of the guide wire to be transported in the longitudinal direction, and design parameters setting method of the feed speed and the interval of the roller supporting the wire is proposed to minimize the vibration amplitude of the guide wire during transport. The Teflon coating of the medical guide wire was carried out based on the developed coating equipment. The target coating thickness of the guide wire was set to less than $10{\mu}m$ in the circumferential direction, and the results were examined by optical microscopy.

• International Journal of Computer Science & Network Security
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• v.21 no.11
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• pp.338-344
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• 2021

The recently continuous enhancement and development in the biomedical side for the betterment of human life. The Wireless Body Area Networks is a significant tool for the current researcher to design and transfer data with greater data rates among the sensors and sensor nodes for biomedical applications. The core area for research in WBANs is power efficiency, battery-driven devices for health and medical, the Charging limitation is a major and serious problem for the WBANs.this research work is proposed to find out the optimal solution for battery-friendly technology. In this research we have addressed the solution to increasing the battery lifetime with variable data transmission rates from medical equipment as Wireless Endoscopy Capsules, this device will analyze a patient's inner body gastrointestinal tract by capturing images and visualization at the workstation. The second major issue is that the Wireless Endoscopy Capsule based systems are currently not used for clinical applications due to their low data rate as well as low resolution and limited battery lifetime, in case of these devices are more enhanced in these cases it will be the best solution for the medical applications. The main objective of this research is to power optimization by reducing the power consumption of the battery in the Wireless Endoscopy Capsule to make it battery-friendly. To overcome the problem we have proposed the algorithm for "Battery Friendly Algorithm" and we have compared the different frame rates of buffer sizes for Transmissions. The proposed Battery Friendly Algorithm is to send the images on average frame rate instead of transmitting the images on maximum or minimum frame rates. The proposed algorithm extends the battery lifetime in comparison with the previous baseline proposed algorithm as well as increased the battery lifetime of the capsule.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.45 no.2
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• pp.81-89
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• 2024

Purpose : This study conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis to evaluate the clinical effectiveness of laser acupuncture for each condition using information from laser acupuncture trials registered on clinicaltrials.gov from January 2013 to June 2023. Methods : We quantitatively and qualitatively analysed the results of 16 clinical trials of laser acupuncture whose research results were confirmed. A risk of bias assessment was also carried out to assess the quality of each clinical trial. Results : A meta-analysis including three clinical trials was conducted to evaluate the comparative effectiveness of laser acupuncture and sham laser acupuncture in reducing pain and found that the laser acupuncture group had a statistically significant reduction in pain compared with the sham laser acupuncture group. In addition, 11 of the 13 trials not included in the meta-analysis showed a positive effect of laser acupuncture. Conclusion : Although laser acupuncture has a long history of clinical use and a lot of research, there is still some scepticism due to the lack of a clear mechanism of action and inconsistent reports of clinical effectiveness. In addition, there is a significant lack of systematic reviews of clinical evidence for major disease specific, and ongoing research is needed to establish an objective evidence base for the clinical effectiveness of laser acupuncture.