• Safety and Health at Work
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.63-71
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• 2016

Background: Construction painters have not been studied well in terms of their hazards exposure. The objective of this study was to evaluate the exposure levels of total volatile organic compounds (TVOCs) for painters in the construction industry. Methods: Activity-specific personal air samplings were carried out in three waterproofing activities [polyurethane (PU), asphalt, and cement mortar] and three painting activities (epoxy, oil based, and water based) by using organic-vapor-monitor passive-sampling devices. Gas chromatograph with flame ionization detector could be used for identifying and quantifying individual organic chemicals. The levels of TVOCs, by summing up 15 targeted substances, were expressed in exposure-index (EI) values. Results: As arithmetic means in the order of concentration levels, the EIs of TVOCs in waterproofing works were 10.77, 2.42, 1.78, 1.68, 0.47, 0.07, and none detected (ND) for indoor PU-primer task, outdoor PU-primer task, outdoor PU-resin task, indoor PU-resin task, asphalt-primer task, asphalt-adhesive task, and cement-mortar task, respectively. The highest EI for painting works was 5.61 for indoor epoxyprimer task, followed by indoor epoxy-resin task (2.03), outdoor oil-based-spray-paint task (1.65), outdoor water-based-paint task (0.66), and indoor oil-based-paint task (0.15). Assuming that the operations were carried out continuously for 8 hours without breaks and by using the arithmetic means of EIs for each of the 12 tasks in this study, 58.3% (7 out of 12) exceeded the exposure limit of 100% (EI > 1.0), while 8.3% (1 out of 12) was in 50e100% of exposure limit (0.5 > EI > 1.0), and 4 tasks out of 12 were located in less than 50% of the limit range (EI < 0.5). Conclusion: From this study, we recognized that construction painters are exposed to various solvents, including carcinogens and reproductive toxins, and the levels of TVOC concentration in many of the painting tasks exceeded the exposure limits. Construction workers need to be protected from chemical agents during their painting works by using personal protective devices and/or work practice measures. Additional studies should focus on the exposure assessment of other hazards for construction workers, in order to identify high-risk tasks and to improve hazardous work environments.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Bio-Environment Control Conference
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• 1995.04a
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• pp.55-56
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• 1995

작물의 생육환경을 계측하기 위한 환경 센서는 공업용으로 이용되는 센서들과는 달리 작물의 적정 생장환경 범위 내에서의 정확도와 안정성이 중요하고, 온실 환경에 대한 내구성 및 신뢰성이 요구되며, 가격이 저렴하고, 소형ㆍ경량화가 이루어져야 한다. 또한, 생장환경 변화로써 작물의 생장량을 증대시킬 수 있도록 하기 위해 생장환경 자료를 수집ㆍ분석할 수 있는 시스템도 필요하다. (중략)

• Korean Institute of Interior Design Journal
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.79-87
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• 2009

Residential Buildings should provide high-quality, comfortable environments to support the activities of their occupants. The indoor environment of residential buildings, which includes thermal, lighting, acoustic, and indoor air quality, has a significant impact on health and quality of life. The comfortable living environment in residential buildings result from appropriately combining these environmental quality factors, and the performance of building systems must be compatible with the activities of the occupants. The objective of this research is to investigate and analyze the relationship between physical environmental conditions and occupant responses for improving environmental quality (EQ) in apartment buildings with four different building orientations (i.e. E, W, S, N) in two different seasons (i.e. winter and summer). The occupant survey was conducted in actual apartment buildings. The Physical environmental conditions in apartment buildings differed substantially depending on space, outdoor weather conditions and building orientations. Each space within the same apartment building had different environmental conditions. Combinations of unbalanced physical environmental conditions in apartment building decrease occupants' satisfactions and their perceptions of overall residential quality. Occupants' satisfaction and their responses to physical characteristics of their residential environment is related to thermal, lighting, acoustic, and indoor air conditions in their buildings. The result from this research will help designers and researchers to identify problems and develop solutions for improving environmental quality from the occupants' point of view.

• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• v.13 no.6
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• pp.2456-2467
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• 2018

Wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs) require real-time quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees to be provided by the network. The end-to-end delay is very critical metric for QoS guarantees in WMSNs. In WMSNs, due to the transmission errors incurred over wireless channels, it is difficult to obtain reliable delivery of data in conjunction with low end-to-end delay. In order to improve the end-to-end delay performance, the system has to drop few packets during network congestion. In this article, our proposal is based on optimization of end-to end delay for WMSNs. We optimize end-to-end delay constraint by assuming that each packet is allowed fixed number of retransmissions. To optimize the end-to-end delay, first, we compute the performance measures of the system, such as end-to-end delay and reliability for different network topologies (e.g., linear topology, tree topology) and against different choices of system parameters (e.g., data rate, number of nodes, number of retransmissions). Second, we study the impact of the end-to-end delay and packet delivery ratio on indoor and outdoor environments in WMSNs. All scenarios are simulated with multiple run-times by using network simulator-2 (NS-2) and results are evaluated and discussed.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea TC
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• v.45 no.12
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• pp.97-104
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• 2008

Location-based services provide customized information or services according to the user's location. The existing localization schemes for outdoor environment are not applicable to the indoor localization system which requires higher accuracy of location estimation than that of the outdoor localization system. In this paper, we employ the received signal strength(RSS) to approximate the distance between a moving target and a reference point and use the triangulation method to estimate the location of the moving target for the indoor localization system in IEEE 802.15.4 wireless PAN(personal area network). For the indoor localization system, we propose a scheme which selects the best reference points to enhance the localization accuracy and adaptively reflects the changes in propagation environments of a moving target to the distance approximation. Through the implementation of the localization system, we have verified the performance of the proposed scheme in terms of the estimation accuracy.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.42 no.6
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• pp.627-636
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• 2023

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the global population has experienced drastic changes, one of which is the increase in remote work. Given the ongoing possibility of exposure to infectious diseases and various other circumstances, the expansion of remote work is anticipated. To enhance the efficiency of remote work and address its existing limitations, this study surveyed the perceptions of indoor environments among individuals who worked from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study examined how the characteristics of individuals influenced their perceptions of indoor environments. It was found that the number of occupants and rooms, size of the house, and noise sensitivity affected the perceptions of outdoor noise, neighbor noise, and indoor noise caused by cohabitants. The findings can be used as foundational data for designing multipurpose housing that can be utilized not only for residential purposes but also for work and educational settings in the future.

• Journal of Environmental Health Sciences
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• v.45 no.1
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• pp.1-8
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• 2019

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to estimate the ventilation rate of residential homes in Korea through tracer gas methods using indoor and outdoor concentrations of carbon dioxide ($CO_2$) and $CO_2$ generation rates from breathing. Methods: In this study, we calculated the number of occupants in a home by time through data on the average number of people per household from the Korean National Statistical Office and also measured the amount of $CO_2$ generation by breathing to estimate the indoor $CO_2$ generation rate. To estimate the ventilation rate, several factors such as the $CO_2$ generation rate and average volume of residential house provided by the Korean National Statistical Office, indoor $CO_2$ concentrations measured by sensors, and outdoor $CO_2$ concentrations provided by the Korea Meteorological Administration, were applied to a mass balance model for residential indoor environments. Results: The average number of people were 2.53 per household and Koreans spend 61.0% of their day at home. The $CO_2$ generation rate from breathing was $13.9{\pm}5.3L/h$ during sleep and $15.1{\pm}5.7L/h$ in a sedentary state. Indoor and outdoor $CO_2$ concentrations were 849 ppm and 407 ppm, respectively. The ventilation rate in Korean residential houses calculated by the mass balance model were $42.1m^3/h$ and 0.71 air change per hour. Conclusions: The estimated ventilation rate tended to increase with an increase in the number of occupants. Since sensor devices were used to collect data, sustainable data could be collected to estimate the ventilation rate of Korean residential homes, which enables further studies such as on changes in the ventilation rate by season resulting from the activities of occupants. The results of this study could be used as a basis for exposure and risk assessment modeling.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.25 no.7
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• pp.85-92
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• 2020

Following the development of Internet of Things (IoT) technology, the scope of application of IoT technology is expanding to industrial safety areas that detect and prevent possible risks in outdoor environments in advance, away from improving the convenience of living in indoor environments. Although this expansion of IoT service provides many advantages, it also causes security problems such as data leakage and modulation, so research on security response strategies is being actively carried out. In this paper, the IoT-based road construction risk management system in outdoor environment is proposed as a research subject. As a result of investigating the security vulnerabilities of the low-power wide-area (LPWA, BLE) communication protocol applied to the research targets, the security vulnerabilities were identified in terms of confidentiality, integrity, and availability, which are the three major elements of information security, and countermeasures for each vulnerability were proposed. This study is meaningful in investigating and analyzing possible vulnerabilities in the operation of the IoT-based risk management system and proposing practical security guidelines for each vulnerability.

• Journal of Environmental Health Sciences
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.87-98
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• 2001

There has been increased interest in the health effects of the Environmental Tobacco Smoke(ETS) as a confirmed human carcinogen. It has been known to be extremely difficult to make an accurate assessment of exposure to ETS since it is consisted of a variety of components and there are a number of labile chemicals. Therefore, it is necessary to obtain, to interpretate and to provide the data of quantitative exposure assessment to ETS in the field of environmental health. The purpose of this research is to evaluate the concentration of ETS using VOC in indoor office environments. The correlations and concentrations of benzene, RSP, 3-EP, nicotine that are indicators for ETS were investigate with smoking density, air change per hour(ventilation rate). Air samples were taken in smoking room(7 sites), smoking allowed office (3 sites), corridor outside smoking room(7 sites), non-smoking office (9 sites). The concentrations of benzene showed significant difference according to category of indoor office environments. The geometric mean concentration of benzene were 23.56 ${\mu}{\textrm}{m}$/㎥(range 4.80~192.90 ${\mu}{\textrm}{m}$/㎥) in smoking rooms. 6.16 ${\mu}{\textrm}{m}$/㎥ in smoking allowed offices, 1.32 ${\mu}{\textrm}{m}$/㎥ in the non-smoking offices respectively. The ratios of the concentration of benzene between outdoor air and smoking room, smoking allowed office, and non-smoking indicators concentrations, SD, and SI were 0.82(benzene and nicotine). 0.76(benzene and RSP), 0.60(benzene and SD), 0.76(benzene and SI). It is proposed that benzene is a good indicator for ETS.

• Proceedings of the SAREK Conference
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• 2008.06a
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• pp.970-975
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• 2008

This study considers indoor thermal comfort in an ondol space by supply vent configurations to prevent cold draft in winter. A specially-designed vent cap has been investigated in comparison with a round pan-type vent and a simple opening without a cap. Numerical simulations have been conducted using CFD to analyze thermal comfort indices such as Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) and Effective Draft Temperature (EDT) as well as air distribution index i.e. Air Diffusion Performance Index (ADPI). Results show the new vent cap provides improved thermal comfort conditions especially near ondol heated floor, as the cold outdoor air spreads upwards along the vertical wall before reaching occupant region near floor. This paper includes discussions on the flow and comfort distributions created by the thermal jets from the vents.