• Safety and Health at Work
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.192-198
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• 2012

Objectives: Slip and fall accidents in the workplace are one of the top causes of work related fatalities and injuries. Previous studies have indicated that fall risk was related to postural and dynamic stability. However, the usage of this theoretical relationship was limited by laboratory based measuring instruments. The current study proposed a new method for stability assessment by use of inertial measurement units (IMUs). Methods: Accelerations at different body parts were recorded by the IMUs. Postural and local dynamic stability was assessed from these measures and compared with that computed from the traditional method. Results: The results demonstrated: 1) significant differences between fall prone and healthy groups in IMU assessed dynamic stability; and 2) better power of discrimination with multi stability index assessed by IMUs. Conclusion: The findings can be utilized in the design of a portable screening or monitoring tool for fall risk assessment in various industrial settings.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.77-86
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• 2019

The purpose of this study is to examine how the characteristics of family firms affect stock price crash risk. Prior studies argued that the opacity of information due to agency problem causes a plunge in stock prices. The governance characteristics of family firms can increase information opacity which leads to crash risk. Therefore, this study verifies whether family firms have a high possibility of stock price crash risk. We use a logistic regression model to test the relationship between family firms and stock price crash risk using listed firms listed on the Korean Stock Exchange during the fiscal years 2011 through 2017. The family firm is defined as the case where the controlling shareholder is the chief executive officer or the registered executive. If the controlling shareholder's share is less than 5%, it is not considered a family business. We found that family firms are more likely to experience a plunge in stock prices. This supports the hypothesis of this study that passive information disclosure behavior and information opacity of family firms increase stock price crash risk.

• Journal of the Korean Society of School Health
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.61-73
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• 2008

Purpose: Several health behavior factors affect the incidence of type 2 diabetes. Especially, obesity, which causes insulin resistance, is the most important determinant of diabetes. Therefore, we expect the risk factors associated with insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes are affected by obesity and, additionally, the related factors with diabetes caused by obesity can be controlled. Methods: This study used data collected from the 2001 Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (KNHANES). A stratified multistage probability sampling method was applied and the final sample included 5,500 subjects over 30 years old who had completed necessary health examinations and health behaviors survey. Results: The risk factors associated with type 2 diabetes are affected by obesity. According to logistic regression model stratified by body mass index (BMI) and sex, abdominal obesity and age were the significant risk factors of diabetes regardless of sex and BMI. However, drinking, smoking, total energy consumption, and protein consumption were risk factors for women with normal BMI, while carbohydrate consumption was a risk factor for man with normal BMI. Sleeping hours affected diabetes for women with obesity and fiber consumption was a risk factor for both women and men with obesity. In addition, statistically the family history of diabetes was a significant risk factor only in the group with normal weight, not in the group with obesity. Conclusion: The study results will provide information for implementing a regional initiative of type 2 diabetes prevention by BMI.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.31 no.5
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• pp.82-88
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• 2016

The current risk assessment system do not reflect workers' various opinion. However, the worker actually are in the center of work field and are exposed to accidents. In this regard, this study suggests enhanced risk assessment by 'safety circle discussion' on workers' hand. The self-administered surveys on supervisors and workers were done for the effect analysis of the safety circle discussion. According to the question investigation, even though the current risk assessment causes difficulties in preventing accidents by unsafe behaviors, the worker-oriented safety circle discussion establishing measures for risk factors of each work type will be able to prevent accidents more effectively. Also, it can positively contribute to safety health awareness, industrial accident prevention, accurate recognition on risk factors, improving safety facilities/work conditions, workers' compliance to safety health rules. Lastly, most respondents agreed that it is necessary to form organic relationship through circle discussion and deriving safety inspections that workers participate.

• Journal of the Korea Safety Management & Science
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.1-9
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• 2014

The occupational health and safety accidents were continuously increased during handling, usage and manufacturing the chemical materials according to increase of small and medium sized enterprises in domestic industries. These accidents mainly resulted from insufficient occupational health and safety management and deteriorative facilities and focused on corresponding operation to minimize the damage of accidents after occurrence. But, it was required that we grasped the occurrence causes of occupational health and safety risk in handling, usage and manufacturing the chemical materials and develop the adequate corresponding operation and system according to the possible occurrence of occupational health and safety risk. This study deals with the development of risk assessment model to derive the risk and important risk of occupational health and safety and then help to construct the self-controlled occupational health and safety system for small and medium sized enterprises handling the chemical materials.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Gas
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.25-31
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• 2008

Recently risk management based on a quantitative assessment is considered to improve the level of safety in Korea. This paper focuses on the procedure of the quantitative risk assessment for natural gas pipelines. For that purpose, the methods to estimate failure frequency based on failure causes from European Gas Pipeline Incident Data Group and BG Transco, to analyze consequence caused by fire, and to calculate individual risk and societal risk have been proposed systematically in this paper. Risk criteria of individual risk and societal risk have been proposed by considering the environment of pipeline route in Korea. The proposed procedure of quantitative risk assessment may be useful for risk management during the planning and building stages of a new pipeline, and modification of buried pipeline.

• Korean Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
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• v.4 no.4 s.16
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• pp.201-211
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• 2003

Considering about construction projects characteristics, there Is an existing uncertainty which causes inaccuracy or invalidity under decision making situation. Therefore, cost risk analysis of numerous construction projects are Inclined to depend on expert's experiences and subjective judgements. In Korean domestic construction works, however, there is no reasonable method or process for applying subjective elements. Only probabilistic analysis using objective calculation are being used now. This research suggests a cost risk analysis method to analyze quantitatively Cost Impact by risk, and it appraises expert's subjective elements for the purpose of enhancing validity of cost estimation. Moreover, a new cost risk analysis method is introduced for providing convenient user interface in practical business.

• Journal of Korean Institute of Industrial Engineers
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.609-628
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• 1995

This paper presents a reliability model and a data-analytic procedure for a repairable unit subject to failures due to multiple non-identifiable causes. We regard a failure cause as a state and assume the life distribution for each cause to be exponential. Then we represent the dependency among the causes by a Markov switching model(MSM) and estimate the transition probabilities and failure rates by maximum likelihood(ML) method. The failure data are incomplete due to masked causes of failures. We propose a specific version of EM(expectation and maximization) algorithm for finding maximum likelihood estimator(MLE) under this situation. We also develop statistical procedures for determining the number of significant states and for testing independency between state transitions. Our model requires only the successive failure times of a unit to perform the statistical analysis. It works well even when the causes of failures are fully masked, which overcomes the major deficiency of competing risk models. It does not require the assumption of stationarity or independency which is essential in mixture models. The stationary probabilities of states can be easily calculated from the transition probabilities estimated in our model, so it covers mixture models in general. The results of simulations show the consistency of estimation and accuracy gradually increasing according to the difference of failure rates and the frequency of transitions among the states.

• Industrial Engineering and Management Systems
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.335-344
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• 2016

Construction project is a competitive business with high risk especially in developing countries like Iran which faces with many problems such as delay and time and costs increases. Thus, the first priority here is to determine the causes of prolongation of construction projects and to evaluate their importance. Khuzestan Steel Company (KSC) has made important contribution to the projects in Iran and in turn is required to finish them on time. In this study, an attempt was made to investigate the causes of delay in implementation of construction projects held by this company. Data was collected through questionnaire distributed among the sample including 10 owners, 10 consultants and 15 con-tractors. Accordingly, participants rated the causes in the questionnaire so the most important priorities of each area were specified using TOPSIS method. The results showed that according to the employers, consultants and contractors' viewpoints, the most important reason for delays in construction projects of KSC is related to the financial matters. Hence, according to the results obtained, causes for delays in the company's projects are largely related to the drilling permits and long administrative cycle to renew them. Besides, continuous production of steel in this company is another reason to delays of construction projects.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.589-594
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• 2013

Background: Prospective cohort studies to determine cofactors with oncogenic HPV-infections for cervical cancer are very rare from developing countries and such data are limited to the few screening trials. Large screening trials provide such data as a by product. Some of the cases are prevented by screening and do not surface as invasive cancers at all. Also, pre-invasive lesions are detected almost entirely by screening. Screening causes selection bias if attendance in or effectiveness of screening is correlated with the risk factors. The aim of this study was to quantify the influence of screening on risk factors for cervical cancer. Materials and Methods: Our material stems from a rural cohort of 80,000 women subjected to a randomised screening trial. The effect of screening on the incidence of cervix cancer was estimated with reference to socio-demographic and reproductive risk factors of cervical cancer. We compared these risks with the incidence of cancer in the randomised control population by the same determinants of risk. Results: The results in the screening arm compared to the control arm showed that the women of low SES and young age were benefitting more than those of high SES and old age. The relative risk by age (30-39 vs 50-59) was 0.33 in the control arm and 0.24 in the screening arm. The relative risk by education (not educated vs educated) was 2.8 in the control arm and 1.8 in the screening arm. The previously married women did not benefit (incidence 113 and 115 per 100,000 women years in control vs screening arms) whereas the effect was substantial in those married (86 vs 54). Conclusions: The results in controls were consistent with the general evidence, but results in attenders and nonattenders of the screening arm showed that screening itself and self-selection in attendance and effectiveness can influence the effect estimates of risk factors. The effect of cervical cancer screening programmes on the estimates of incidence of cervical cancer causes bias in the studies on etiology and, therefore, they should be interpreted with caution.