• Journal of Power Electronics
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.1226-1235
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• 2016

For wearable health monitoring systems, a fundamental problem is the limited space for storing energy, which can be translated into a short operational life. In this paper, a highly efficient active voltage doubling rectifier with a wide input range for micro-piezoelectric energy harvesting systems is proposed. To obtain a higher output voltage, the Dickson charge pump topology is chosen in this design. By replacing the passive diodes with unbalanced-biased comparator-controlled active counterparts, the proposed rectifier minimizes the voltage losses along the conduction path and solves the reverse leakage problem caused by conventional comparator-controlled active diodes. To improve the rectifier input voltage sensitivity and decrease the minimum operational input voltage, two low power common-gate comparators are introduced in the proposed design. To keep the comparator from oscillating, a positive feedback loop formed by the capacitor C is added to it. Based on the SMIC 0.18-μm standard CMOS process, the proposed rectifier is simulated and implemented. The area of the whole chip is 0.91×0.97 mm², while the rectifier core occupies only 13% of this area. The measured results show that the proposed rectifier can operate properly with input amplitudes ranging from 0.2 to 1.0V and with frequencies ranging from 20 to 3000 Hz. The proposed rectifier can achieve a 92.5% power conversion efficiency (PCE) with input amplitudes equal to 0.6 V at 200 Hz. The voltage conversion efficiency (VCE) is around 93% for input amplitudes greater than 0.3 V and load resistances larger than 20kΩ.

• Journal of Convergence for Information Technology
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• v.7 no.6
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• pp.209-218
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• 2017

To propose a contents model for children's smart watch, this study interview 15mothers who have a child using smart watches. Most mothers purchase smart watches for children to warrant their security and manage their schedules, and they use them for sending a call or text to their children, tracking or managing children's location and schedule. Mothers were satisfied with a smart watch's function of communication and safety management, but dissatisfied learning-oriented contents and worrried about bad influenced on children development. Through in-depth interviews, this study propose a persona model for children's smart watch for enhancing parent-child interaction and physical cognitive language socioemotional convergence play contents.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.113-121
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• 2020

With the rapid development of information and communication technology (ICT), various sensors are being embedded in wearable devices. Consequently, these devices can continuously collect data including health data from individuals. The collected health data can be used not only for healthcare services but also for analyzing an individual's lifestyle by combining with other external data. This helps in making an individual's life more convenient and healthier. However, collecting health data may lead to privacy issues since the data is personal, and can reveal sensitive insights about the individual. Thus, in this paper, we present a method to collect an individual's health data from a smart band in a privacy-preserving manner. We leverage the local differential privacy to achieve our goal. Additionally, we propose a way to find feature points from health data. This allows for an effective trade-off between the degree of privacy and accuracy. We carry out experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach and the results show that, with the proposed method, the error rate can be reduced upto 77%.

• The Journal of the Institute of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.21-26
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• 2022

In this paper, we investigated the effect of tilting and bending of an 2.45GHz ISM band embroidered dipole array antenna due to the human body movement. The antenna characteristics showed larger variations in tilting on the X-axis than the Y-axis. The antenna gain varied by 0.25[dB] when the antenna tilted by 3.5°. As tilting angle increased the operating frequency(f_o) showed decreasing tendency and the return loss(S₁₁) showed increasing tendency. The antenna characteristics also showed more variation in bending on the X-axis than the Y-axis. As bending the antenna the antenna characteristics affected much more in bending on the X-axis than the Y-axis. The antenna gain varied by 3.73[dB] as the curvature(1/R_rad) increased by 0.04[mm^-1]. As it bended more the operating frequency(f_o) showed decreasing and then increasing tendency and the return loss(S₁₁) showed increasing tendency.

• Physical Therapy Rehabilitation Science
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.311-320
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• 2022

Objective: To investigate the reliability and validity of static balance measurements using an acceleration sensor and a gyroscope sensor in smart phone inertial sensors. Design: Equivalent control group pretest-posttest. Methods: Subjects were forty five healthy adults aged twenty to fifty-years-old who had no disease that could affect the experiment. After pre-test, all participants wore a waist band with smart phone, and conducted six static balance measurements on the force plate twice for 35 seconds each. To investigate the test-retest reliability of both smart phone inertial sensors, we compared the intra-correlation coefficient (ICC 3, 1) between primary and secondary measurements with the calculated root mean scale-total data. To determine the validity of the two sensors, it was measured simultaneously with force plate, and the comparision was done by Pearson's correlation. Results: The test-retest reliability showed excellent correlation for acceleration sensor, and it also showed excellent to good correlation for gyroscope sensor(p<0.05). The concurrent validity of smartphone inertial sensors showed a mostly poor to fair correlation for tandem-stance and one-leg-stance (p<0.05) and unacceptable correlation for the other postures (p>0.05). The gyroscope sensor showed a fair correlation for most of the RMS-Total data, and the other data also showed poor to fair correlation (p<0.05). Conclusions: The result indicates that both acceleration sensor and gyroscope sensor has good reliability, and that compared to force plate, acceleration sensor has unacceptable or poor correlation, and gyroscope sensor has mostly fair correlation.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.39-46
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• 2021

In this paper, we propose a method for the motion recognition method required in the industrial field in mixed reality. In industrial sites, movements (grasping, lifting, and carrying) are required throughout the upper full-body, from trunk movements to arm movements. In this paper, we use a method composed of sensors and wearable devices that are not vision-based such as Kinect without using heavy motion capture equipment. We used two IMU sensors for the trunk and shoulder movement, and used Myo arm band for the arm movements. Real-time data coming from a total of 4 are fused to enable motion recognition for the entire upper body area. As an experimental method, a sensor was attached to the actual clothes, and objects were manipulated through synchronization. As a result, the method using the synchronization method has no errors in large and small operations. Finally, through the performance evaluation, the average result was 50 frames for single-handed operation on the HoloLens and 60 frames for both-handed operation.

• Science of Emotion and Sensibility
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.97-106
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• 2019

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of the type and measurement location of a fabric strain gauge sensor on the detection performance for respiratory signals. We implemented two types of sensors to measure the respiratory signal and attached them to a band to detect the respiratory signal. Eight healthy males in their 20s were the subject of this study. They were asked to wear two respiratory bands in turns. While the subjects were measured for 30 seconds standing comfortably, the respiratory was given at 15 breaths per minute were synchronized, and then a 10-second break; subsequently, the entire measurement was repeated. Measurement locations were at the chest and abdomen. In addition, to verify the performance of respiratory measurement in the movement state, the subjects were asked to walk in place at a speed of 80 strides per minute(SPM), and the respiratory was measured using the same method mentioned earlier. Meanwhile, to acquire a reference signal, the SS5LB of BIOPAC Systems, Inc., was worn by the subjects simultaneously with the experimental sensor. The Kruskal-Wallis test and Bonferroni post hoc tests were performed using SPSS 24.0 to verify the difference in measurement performances among the group of eight combinations of sensor types, measurement locations, and movement states. In addition, the Wilcoxon test was conducted to examine whether there are differences according to sensor type, measurement location, and movement state. The results showed that the respiratory signal detection performance was the best when the respiratory was measured in the chest using the CNT-coated fabric sensor regardless of the movement state. Based on the results of this study, we will develop a chest belt-type wearable platform that can monitor the various vital signal in real time without disturbing the movements in an outdoor environment or in daily activities.

• Journal of Navigation and Port Research
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• v.38 no.4
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• pp.367-371
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• 2014

When the crew or passengers fall into the water due to marine accident of vessel, it is very important to rescue them quickly. In the case of marine accidents, most people in distress have been wearing a lifejacket, so if the GPS and Cospas-Sarsat communication module will be integrated within the lifejacket, it is easy to rescue them. In this paper, development of the dual band lifejacket-integrated antenna for GPS and Cospas-Sarsat communication is discussed. The antenna with the FR-4 substrate of 0.2mm thickness for flexibility was designed that it can be fitted close to the shoulder of the life jacket and operate at 1.575GHz and 406MHz. The GPS communication antenna was implemented with a ring-slot antenna having a circular polarized characteristic and a meander type linear polarized antenna is used as Cospas-Sarsat communication. The two antennas are fed by a single microstrip line and an open stub is used to minimize the mutual interference between the two antennas. The performance of the fabricated antenna attached to the life vest is confirmed by the measurement of the return loss at GPS and Cospas-Sarsat frequency bands.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2012.08a
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• pp.115-116
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• 2012

The demand for flexible electronic systems such as wearable computers, E-paper, and flexible displays has increased due to their advantages of excellent portability, conformal contact with curved surfaces, light weight, and human friendly interfaces over present rigid electronic systems. This seminar introduces three recent progresses that can extend the application of high performance flexible inorganic electronics. The first part of this seminar will introduce a RRAM with a one transistor-one memristor (1T-1M) arrays on flexible substrates. Flexible memory is an essential part of electronics for data processing, storage, and radio frequency (RF) communication and thus a key element to realize such flexible electronic systems. Although several emerging memory technologies, including resistive switching memory, have been proposed, the cell-to-cell interference issue has to be overcome for flexible and high performance nonvolatile memory applications. The cell-to-cell interference between neighbouring memory cells occurs due to leakage current paths through adjacent low resistance state cells and induces not only unnecessary power consumption but also a misreading problem, a fatal obstacle in memory operation. To fabricate a fully functional flexible memory and prevent these unwanted effects, we integrated high performance flexible single crystal silicon transistors with an amorphous titanium oxide (a-TiO2) based memristor to control the logic state of memory. The $8{\times}8$ NOR type 1T-1M RRAM demonstrated the first random access memory operation on flexible substrates by controlling each memory unit cell independently. The second part of the seminar will discuss the flexible GaN LED on LCP substrates for implantable biosensor. Inorganic III-V light emitting diodes (LEDs) have superior characteristics, such as long-term stability, high efficiency, and strong brightness compared to conventional incandescent lamps and OLED. However, due to the brittle property of bulk inorganic semiconductor materials, III-V LED limits its applications in the field of high performance flexible electronics. This seminar introduces the first flexible and implantable GaN LED on plastic substrates that is transferred from bulk GaN on Si substrates. The superb properties of the flexible GaN thin film in terms of its wide band gap and high efficiency enable the dramatic extension of not only consumer electronic applications but also the biosensing scale. The flexible white LEDs are demonstrated for the feasibility of using a white light source for future flexible BLU devices. Finally a water-resist and a biocompatible PTFE-coated flexible LED biosensor can detect PSA at a detection limit of 1 ng/mL. These results show that the nitride-based flexible LED can be used as the future flexible display technology and a type of implantable LED biosensor for a therapy tool. The final part of this seminar will introduce a highly efficient and printable BaTiO3 thin film nanogenerator on plastic substrates. Energy harvesting technologies converting external biomechanical energy sources (such as heart beat, blood flow, muscle stretching and animal movements) into electrical energy is recently a highly demanding issue in the materials science community. Herein, we describe procedure suitable for generating and printing a lead-free microstructured BaTiO3 thin film nanogenerator on plastic substrates to overcome limitations appeared in conventional flexible ferroelectric devices. Flexible BaTiO3 thin film nanogenerator was fabricated and the piezoelectric properties and mechanically stability of ferroelectric devices were characterized. From the results, we demonstrate the highly efficient and stable performance of BaTiO3 thin film nanogenerator.

• Science of Emotion and Sensibility
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.63-76
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• 2018

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of contact type textile electrode structure on heart activity signal acquisition for smart healthcare. In this study, we devised six contact type textile electrodes whose electrode size and configuration were manipulated for measuring heart activity signals using computerized embroidery. We detected heart activity signals using a modified lead II and by attaching each textile electrode to the chest band in four healthy male subjects in a standing static posture. We measured the signals four times repeatedly for all types of electrodes. The heart activity signals were sampled at 1 kHz using a BIOPAC ECG100, and the detected original signals were filtered through a band-pass filter. To compare the performance of heart activity signal acquisition among the different structures of the textile electrodes, we conducted a qualitative analysis using signal waveform and size as parameters. In addition, we performed a quantitative analysis by calculating signal power ratio (SPR) of the heart activity signals obtained through each electrode. We analyzed differences in the performance of heart activity signal acquisition of the six electrodes by performing difference and post-hoc tests using nonparametric statistic methods on the calculated SPR. The results showed a significant difference both in terms of qualitative and quantitative aspects of heart activity signals among the tested contact type textile electrodes. Regarding the configurations of the contact type textile electrodes, the three-dimensionally inflated electrode (3DIE) was found to obtain better quality signals than the flat electrode. However, regarding the electrode size, no significant difference was found in performance of heart signal acquisition for the three electrode sizes. These results suggest that the configuration method (flat/3DIE), which is one of the two requirements of a contact type textile electrode structure for heart activity signal acquisition, has a critical effect on the performance of heart activity signal acquisition for wearable healthcare. Based on the results of this study, we plan to develop a smart clothing technology that can monitor high-quality heart activity without time and space constraints by implementing a clothing platform integrated with the textile electrode and developing a performance improvement plan.