• Journal of the Korea Safety Management & Science
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.57-70
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• 2002

Back pain is painful for people at a lower lumber(L4/L5 or L5/S1). It is experienced as a most frequent disaster 70％ of workers have suffered from back-pain. Especially, the occurrence rate of back pain for nurses is very high. Therefore, this study investigates female nurses who worked as a part of a medical cost management team, which mainly deal with the medical insurance in a general hospital at Seoul area. These nurses had different job tasks, which used computers for 50％ of their time, so it can be treated as VDT workers. As a first step of this project, a muscle fatigue was measured for these special VDT workers. First, survey for nurses was conducted to figure out what is a real problem of them. Second, to evaluate an experimental data, a medical cost management team was chosen for subjects. Areas of measurement were 3 places that were the trapezius (TR), the medial deltoid (MD), and the erector spine muscle (ES: L4/L5). These areas are most frequently used, so they were chosen for this study. Measurements were taken before work and after work. From these measurements, it was revealed that a fatigue really comes from their main VDT task excluding natural fatigue after work, so their work environment need to be corrected.

• Industrial Engineering and Management Systems
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.36-46
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• 2005

In traditional production lines, such as assembly lines, each worker is usually assigned to a fixed task, which is beneficial since it reduces the amount of training needed for workers to master their assigned tasks. However, when workers complete their tasks at different speeds, the slowest worker will determine the overall pace of the production line and limit production. To avoid this problem, the self-balancing production line was introduced. In this type of production line, each worker works dynamically, thus they can maintain balanced production. Previous research analyzing the performance of these lines has ignored the walk-back time associated with dynamic workers. U-shaped production lines have also been analyzed and policies for such lines have been proposed. However, the walk-back time cannot be ignored in practice, and research taking this factor into account is needed to enable balanced production and thus the maximum production rate. In this paper, we propose production policies for a production line with the walk-back time taken into account, and define and analyze the conditions for self-balancing. Furthermore, we have compared the performance of such a line with that of other production lines under the same conditions, and the results show the superiority of this line in certain cases.

• Journal of the Ergonomics Society of Korea
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• v.33 no.1
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• pp.59-68
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• 2014

Objective: The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of BackJoy on how it effectively reduces the physical load generated in a posture in which the user sits, increases user's comfort and satisfaction, and maintains the correct posture. Background: Because of development of science and economic development, most office workers and students spend about 75% of their working time in chairs. However most of them have a poor posture. Method: This experiment conducted measurement using a pressure mat and surveyed to evaluate fatigue level, satisfaction and comfort of sit. The study is experimented 20 male and 14 female participants. The participants carried out four different types of tasks and each task took 20 minutes long. Results: In the case of experiment results before and after the use of BackJoy, average pressure, contact area and pressure per unit area appear to prove that using BackJoy is more effective. Conclusion: Through this study, the BackJoy's effects for the maintenance of good posture and loads that occur in the body are reduced. In the future study, there are some researches needed for various verifications using an EMG sensor that shows loads of vertebrae and we need to analyze each group of the participants by dividing them. Application: The evaluation method used in this study can be applied to evaluating ergonomic chairs.

• Journal of the Korean Home Economics Association
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• v.40 no.11
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• pp.193-205
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• 2002

To evaluate farmers' workload during harvesting grapes in summer, this study investigated farmers' physiological, psychological responses, work postures and thermal environment around in the field. This field study was conducted in the Anseong County of Kyonggi Province at the end of August. Five career farmers (1 male, 4 females) volunteered as subjects. Three of them were over their sixties. During harvesting grapes in the field, physiological responses were monitored continuously. 1. Air temperature (T/sub a/), air humidity(H/sub a/), black globe temperature(T/sub g/), air velocity and WBGT around the grape field were 26.9℃, 77.7%RH, 32.8℃, 0.08㎧ and 26.3℃, respectively. Because farmers started the harvesting task in early morning, thermal environments weren't conditions to give farmers severe heat strain. 2. The percentage of the work postures was larger in order of standing, walking, and bending one's back posture. Particularly, the percentage of standing posture with raising both arms above shoulder of two farmers was up to 29% and 61% of the total work duration. 3. Rectal temperature (T/sub re/), mean skin temperature (T/sub sk/), clothing microclimate temperature (T/sub cl/) on the chest and the back, heart rate (HR) and energy expenditure (EE) were 37.2℃, 33.1℃, 32.0℃, 32.4℃, 88bpm and 1.3 Kca1/㎡/min respectively. In the point of these physiological results, we evaluated that the harvesting task was a moderate work. 4. All farmers expressed‘hard, hot, humid and slightly uncomfortable’ at the end of works for each subjective questionnaire. The grape harvesting tasks were not evaluated as a very hard work in the point of physiological work standards. But we considered 1) inappropriate work posture (standing posture with raising both arms above shoulder) and 2) farmers' age as burden factors. These findings suggest that adding adequate protective clothing/equipments for farmers may contribute to maintain their body temperature within the normal range, stabilize HR and decrease psychological strain.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.248-255
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• 1998

The objective of this study is to conduct the prevention method using electromyography that is to resist the strain on L5/S1 disc and to measure the heart rate for the prevention of low back pain during lifting. EMG signals and heart rate were analyzed under the condition of fixed vertical factor (20∼80cm), two horizontal factors (35cm, 55cm), and two weight factors (10kg, 25kg) 2 times per minute for each lifting task. Eight healthy male workers performed nine-step stretching exercises which were intensified back power at the L5/S1 disc for six months. After completion of the two trials, the results were compared. The results of this analysis show that EMG signals have more an effect on the weight than the horizontal factors similar to those analyzed previous study, and are decreased. Therefore, those exercises presented very efficient. Also, there are not statistically significant differences on the analysis result of heart rate between weight factors.

• Progress in Medical Physics
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.72-78
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• 2015

Organic solvents are known toxic effects like vertigo, behavioral obstacle, distracting, and peripheral neuropathy in neuron areas. However, there have been few studies how neurotoxic solvents-exposed workers are affected by the cognitive load of preceding working memory tasks. Therefore, we used fMRI as to measure the neural correlates of working memory impairment in occupational workers who had from chronic exposure to organic solvent. Twenty-nine solvent-exposed workers were included in this study. Each participant concluded the verbal N-back tasks (1- and 2-back) during the fMRI acquisition. Within-group analyses showed fronto-parietal networks were active in each condition. Direct comparisons between 1- and 2-back showed higher activation during the 2-back than 1-back. We found that increased activation of these regions at lower task demand is associated with increased cost of implementing.

• Journal of Korean Institute of Industrial Engineers
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• v.35 no.1
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• pp.109-118
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• 2009

While driving, the manual use of a mobile phone is heavily restricted due to the interference with the primary driving task. An alternative would be the use of speech interface. The current study aims to provide a guideline to implementation of a speech interface to the mobile phone. To do so, an expert evaluation was made and it revealed that a speech interface requires less workload, less performance degradation of the driving task than that of the keypad interface. To make speech interfaces more usable, new improvements are suggested. Subjective workload can be reduced and user satisfaction can be improved without degrading the primary task performance, for instance, by letting the user interrupt the speech of the phone, eliminating the repetitive words, letting the user know clearly what makes an error, providing a way to go back to the previous state, reducing the usage of keypad buttons and reducing the amount of the information on the screen.

• Water Engineering Research
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.129-136
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• 2000

Predicting water levels is a difficult task because a lot of uncertainties are included. Therefore the neural network which is appropriate to such a problem, is introduced. One day ahead forecasting of river stage in the Bocheong River is carried out by using the neural network model. Historical water levels at Snagye gauging point which is located at the downstream of the Bocheong River and average rainfall of the Bocheong River basin are selected as training data sets. With these data sets, the training process has been done by using back propagation algorithm. Then waters levels in 1997 and 1998 are predicted with the trained algorithm. To improve the accuracy, a filtering method is introduced as predicting scheme. It is shown that predicted results are in a good agreement with observed water levels and that a filtering method can overcome the lack of training patterns.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.58 no.1
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• pp.210-215
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• 2009

In this study event-related optical signals were extracted from the prefrontal cortexes using functional near infrared spectroscopy while subjects were carrying out 2-back working memory tasks. Four events such as start, yes, no, and error were considered based on the onsets of the stimulus, positive true responses, positive false responses, and negative responses in the 2-back working memory task, respectively. The optical signals recorded were analyzed by peri-event histograms and power spectrum distributions. The results showed specific characteristics of the event-related optical neuronal signals and an opened possibility of an application to control a non-invasive brain-computer interface system or an object of a virtual reality.

• Journal of Industrial Convergence
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.17-31
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• 2003

Many risk factors with the onset of Low Back Pain(LBP) have been identified, however, lifting out of Manual Material Handling(MMH) was the most important factor to the LBP. Injuries due to lifting took account for 34.0%(227,291) out of the total overexertion in MMH(668,084). The weight, vertical location, twist angle, lifting frequency, and lifting posture were reviewed in this study. Technical information for using the revised lifting equation to evaluate a variety of two - handled manual material handling tasks was suggested. To measure worker's fatigue in lifting task, Lifting Index Simulator(LIS) was create under the revised NIOSH(National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health) lifting equation. For the implementation of the LIS, data was collected in A company manufactures various paints in Si-Wha industrial complex, Kyunggi-Do. The results of the Lifting Index(LI) were analyzed by MANOVA to find the relation with lifting variables collected. It was found that horizontal distance, vertical distance, travelling distance and frequency were significant at the 0.01 level and weight was significant at the 0.05 level. The purpose of this paper is to reduce the chronical low back pain for the manual material handlers.