• Journal of the Ergonomics Society of Korea
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• v.30 no.1
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• pp.265-273
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• 2011

Objective: The aim of this study is to investigate the attributing factors influencing usability of the mobile phones specifically designed for the elderly users. Efforts to identify factors that cause usability problems for the elderly users in using mobile phones can provide the groundwork for changes aimed at usability enhancement and design of interfaces of mobile phones. Background: It became important to understand the behaviors and tendencies of the elderly in communication as the society became older. The problems in digital divide is contributed to mainly lack of understanding in terms of the use pattern of the elderly and lack of consideration of their characteristics in designing user interfaces of most ICT devices. Method: A total of 30 elderly users who were over 65 years in age participated in usability evaluation test experiment and performed seven different tasks using a widely accepted model of universally designed mobile phone. Their performance was compared with that of contrast group that consisted of 10 younger participants who were on their 20s. Results: It was found that the elderly users had hard times in using mobile phones, especially in keypad manipulation among search, understanding, and manipulation subtasks. Conclusion: Older users seemed to have difficulty in all the subtasks of search, recognition, and manipulation. It was suggested that designers of mobile phones need to give careful consideration into designing visual interfaces for search tasks and keypads for easier control and input for the elderly users. Application: The study is expected to provide guidelines for the universal design of mobile phones and their interfaces for enhancing usability of the mobile phone for elderly users.

• Journal of the Ergonomics Society of Korea
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• v.34 no.1
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• pp.75-83
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• 2015

Objective: The aim of this study is to suggest the standard of the direction sign on the pendant switch of overhead cranes which can reduce human errors in control. Background: A great number of crane accidents occur in industries. One of the major causes of the accidents is the mistake in the control of cranes by confusing the orientation of crane movements. Nevertheless, three different direction sign styles, 'East, West, South, North (EWSN)', 'Forward, Backward, Left, Right (FBLR)', and arrows for four directions are used without standardization. Method: An overhead crane simulator was installed for a laboratory experiment. It could move along six directions by the control of a pendant switch. 90 participants were evenly assigned to the three different conditions of direction sign styles. The participants were asked to control the pendant switch according to the continuously appearing 16 direction signs on a monitor ahead. The participants were allowed to refer an orientation sign board on the ceiling representing correct movement directions of the overhead crane simulator. Results: The direction sign style, 'EWSN', showed statistically significant better performance in task completion time and number of errors than the other sign styles. The direction sign style, 'EWSN', adopting the cardinal direction system, made the participants clear in direction controls after customizing to the crane movements. However, the direction sign styles, 'FBLR' and the arrows adopting the relative direction system made conflicts in direction controls due to the egocentric view of human. Conclusion: The direction sign style, 'EWSN', is the most appropriate for the standardization of the direction sign on the pendant switch of overhead cranes. Application: The results of this study can be applied to the standardization of direction sign in the legal notification on the safety certifications of crane manufacturing.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SC
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• v.49 no.4
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• pp.36-44
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• 2012

Electrical impedance tomography is a relatively new imaging modality in which the internal conductivity (or resistivity) distribution of a object is reconstructed based on the injected currents and measured voltages through the electrodes placed on the surface of the object. In this paper, it is assumed that the relationship between the resistivity distribution and the resistance of electrodes is linear. From this linear relation, the weighting matrix can be obtained and modified iterative Landweber method is applied to estimate the internal resistivity distribution. Additionally, to accelerate the convergence rate and improve the spatial resolution of the reconstructed image, optimal step lengths for the iterative Landweber method are computed from the objective function in the least-square sense. The numerical experiments have been performed to illustrate the superior reconstruction performance of the proposed scheme.

• Korean Journal of Soil Science and Fertilizer
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• v.49 no.3
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• pp.242-250
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• 2016

Veterinary antibiotics (VAs) has been used to treat animal disease and to increase animal weight as growth promoter. However, abused usage of VAs can cause production of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) in the environment and additionally, residual of VAs in soil can be transferred into crops. Therefore, main objective of this research was to examine bioaccumulation of VAs in sprouts (red cabbage, Brassica Olearacea L. var. Capitata f. rubra and red radish, Raphanus sativus) with hydroponic method. Total of 7 VAs in 2 different classes of VAs (tetracyclcines: tetracycline, oxytetracycline, chlortetracycline, sulfonamides: sulfamethoxazole, sulfamethazine, sulfamethiazole, macrolides: tylosin) were evaluated and experiment was conducted with solid phase extraction (SPE)/high performance liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (HPLC/MS/MS). Initial spiked concentration of 7 VAs was $5mg\;L^{-1}$ and cultivation period was 8 days. Result showed that growth of sprouts was inhibited about 23-27% when VAs was introduced. Amount of bioaccumulated VAs was also differed depending on class of VAs. The highest amount of bioaccmulated VAs was tetracycline and sulfamethoxazole in each class with a concentration of 4.05, $7.73mg\;kg^{-1}$ respectively. Calculated transfer ratio of VAs into crops was also ranged 0.38-54.27%. Overall, bioaccumulation of VAs in crops can be varied depending on crop species and class of VAs. However, further research should be conducted to verify bioaccumulation of VAs in crops in the soil environment.

• Journal of the Korea Safety Management & Science
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.43-52
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• 2014

In weapon systems development, live fire tests have been frequently adopted to evaluate the performance of the systems under development. Therefore, it is necessary to ensure safety in the test ranges where the live fire tests can cause serious hazards. During the tests, a special care must be taken to protect the test and evaluation (T&E) personnel and also test assets from potential danger and hazards. Thus, the development and management of the range safety process is quite important in the tests of guided missiles and artillery considering the explosive power of the destruction. Note also that with a newly evolving era of weapon systems such as laser, EMP and non-lethal weapons, the test procedure for such systems is very complex. Therefore, keeping the safety level in the test ranges is getting more difficult due to the increased unpredictability for unknown hazards. The objective of this paper is to study on how to enhance the safety in the test ranges. To do so, an approach is proposed based on model-based systems engineering (MBSE). Specifically, a functional architecture is derived utilizing the MBSE method for the design of the range safety process under the condition that the derived architecture must satisfy both the complex test situation and the safety requirements. The architecture developed in the paper has also been investigated by simulation using a computer-aided systems engineering tool. The systematic application of this study in weapon live tests is expected to reduce unexpected hazards and test design time. Our approach is intended to be a trial to get closer to the recent theme in T&E community, "Testing at the speed of stakeholder's need and rapid requirement for rapid acquisition."

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.32 no.6
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• pp.401-408
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• 2019

The objective of this study is to develop a new type of buried sensor module that can directly assess pre-stressed concrete by measuring strain using a hetero-core optical fiber sensor. In this regard, experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of the sensor using an exposure sensor module. Based on the experimental results, when the values of the displacement control velocity were 0.12 mm/min and 1.80 mm/min, the corresponding delays in the measurement were 52.1 s and 2.6 s respectively, which indicated that the maximum delay between the two measurements was a factor of 19. Due to the measurement delay phenomena, the sensor module used in the experiments cannot be employed to check the real-time state of the structure. Thus, additional experiments were needed to develop a new sensor module that can measure the real-time state of the structure. To investigate the cause of the measurement delay phenomena, three experiments were conducted. It was confirmed that measurement delay is mainly attributed to frictional resistance. The measurement delay phenomena were not observed in the experiments using the friction-removed device.

• Journal of Korean Association for Spatial Structures
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• v.7 no.5
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• pp.67-74
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• 2007

The unsymmetrically layered artificial material model is consistently introduced to find the optimum topologies of the plate structures. Reissner-Mindlin (RM) plate theory is adopted to formulate the present 9-node plate element considering the first-order shear deformation of the plates. In the topology optimization process, the strain energy to be minimized is employed as the objective function and the initial volume of structures is adopted as the constraint function. In addition, the resizing algorithm based on the optimality criteria is used to update the hole size introduced in the proposed artificial material model. Several numerical examples are rallied out to investigate the performance of the proposed technique. From numerical results, the proposed topology optimization techniques are found to be very effective to produce the optimum topology of plate structures. In particular, the proposed unsymmetric stiffening layer model make it possible to produce more realistic stiffener design of the plate structures.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.36-42
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• 1996

In this paper, we have proposed the robust estimation of HMM parameters which is based on CDDN(codeword dependent distance normalization)and codeword weighting by distance. The proposed method has used a distance normalization based on the characteristics of a codeword dependent distribution and have computed fuzzy contributions of codeword to a input vector with a fuzzy objective function. From experimental results, we have shown the effectiveness of the proposed method in that the correction rate of the proposed method is improved 4.5% over the conventional FVQ based method. Especially, the application of distance weighting to smoothing of output probability is improved the performance of 2.5% compared to distance based codeword weighting.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.24 no.68
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• pp.51-65
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• 2001

This study is to make LCIA(Life Cycle Impact Assessment) easier as a methodology of environmental scores(called E-score) that integrated environmental load of each emission substance based on environmental damage such as in human health, ecosystem and resources category. The concept is to analyzes the LCI(Life Cycle Inventory) and defines the level of environment damages for human health, ecosystem and resources to objective impact assessment standard, and makes the base of marginal damage to calculate the damage factor, which can present the indication that can establish the standard value of environmental impact. First, damages to human health are calculated by fate analysis, effect analysis and damage analysis to get the damage factor of health effect as a DALY(Disability Adjusted Life Years) unit. Second, damages to ecosystem are calculated by fate analysis, effect analysis and damage analysis to get the damage factor of the effect as a PDF(Potentially Disappeared Fraction) unit through linking potentially increased disappeared fraction. Third, damages to resources are carried out by resource analysis and damage analysis for linking the lower fate to surplus energy conception to get damage factor as a MJ(Mega Joule) unit. For the ranking of relative environment load level each other, LCIA can be carried out effectively by applying this E-score methodology to the particular emission substances. A case study has been introduced for the emission substances coming out of a tire manufacturer in Korea. It is to show how to work the methodology. Based on such study result, product-designers or producers now can apply the E-scores presented in this study to the substances of emission list, and then calculate the environment load of the product or process in advance at any time and can see the environment performance comparatively and expected to contribute to the environmental improvement in view of environmental pollution prevention.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.51-57
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• 2008

We present a modeling of constraint satisfaction problems and provide heuristic algorithms of backtracking search to optimize the frequency assignment. Our research objective is to find a frequency assignment that satisfies all the constraints using minimum number of frequencies while maximizing the number of community radio stations served for a given area. In order to get a effective solution, some ordering heuristics such as variable orderings and value orderings are provided to minimize the backtracking in finding all solutions within a limited time. To complement the late detection of inconsistency in the backtracking, we provide the consistency enforcing technique or constraint propagation to eliminate the values that are inconsistent with some constraints. By integrating backtracking search algorithms with consistency enforcing techniques, it is possible to obtain more powerful and effective algorithms of constraint satisfaction problems. We also provide the performance evaluation of proposed algorithms by comparing the theoretical lower bound and our computed solution.