• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.49-56
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• 2016

The study examined that parents and teachers were aware of what extents behavioral characteristics were related to the children's voice problems. The voice samples of 89 children in the ages of 3 to 5 were collected and their voice quality were graded by G scale of GRBAS. The parents and teachers of the children were asked to complete the questionnaire composed of the pediatric Voice Handicap Index (pVHI) and the psycho- and voice behavioral characteristics of their children. The results are as follows. First, there were no significant differences in both pVHI and behavioral characteristics of their children by G scale. However, significant differences were shown in the behavioral characteristics between parents and teachers, but no difference in pVHI between them. In addition, there was a significant correlation between the psycho-behavioral characteristics and the voice behavioral characteristics in both parents and teachers. These results represent that parents and teachers are not aware of the presence of their children's voice problems and such voice problems are affected by behavioral characteristics associated with the use of voice.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Laryngology, Phoniatrics and Logopedics
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.137-142
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• 2011

Background and Objectives : The aim of this study is to introduce Korea version of pediatric VHI and to compare pVHI-K scores between children with dysphonia and children without voice problems before pVHI-K is developed as a preliminary study. Additionally, the relationship between pVHI and acoustic measures were investigated. Materials and Methods : pVHI-K scores in normal group were obtained from 15 parents who have children with no present or past history of a voice disorder, hearing loss, or related disability that can affect the their voice or speech. Dysphonia group consisted of 15 parents who have children with bilateral vocal fold nodule's at Department of Otolaryngology, the Seoul National University Hospital (SNUH). pVHI-K and acoustic parameters were measured in two group. Results : The mean pVHI scores (total, functional, physical, emotional) in normal group were 2.33 (T), 0.80 (F) 1.33 (P) and 0.27 (E), respectively whereas those of pVHI in children group with dysphonia were 23.13 (T), 11.07 (F), 5.73 (P) and 6.13 (E), respectively and significant differences were revealed in total pVHI score as well as in all of the sub-pVHI scores. Moreover, significant correlation between pVHI-K parameters (T, F, P) and acoustic measures [Shimmer(%)] were shown in children in dysphonia group. Conclusion : Reported by parents can be useful as a supplementary clinical tool for diagnosing and measuring treatment effectiveness in young children with dysphonia.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Industry Convergence
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.42-53
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• 2014

Robust voice recognition (RVR) is essential for a robot to communicate with people. One of the main problems with RVR for robots is that robots inevitably real environment noises. The noise is captured with strong power by the microphones, because the noise sources are closed to the microphones. The signal-to-noise ratio of input voice becomes quite low. However, it is possible to estimate the noise by using information on the robot's own motions and postures, because a type of motion/gesture produces almost the same pattern of noise every time it is performed. In this paper, we propose an RVR system which can robustly recognize voice by adults and children in noisy environments. We evaluate the RVR system in a communication robot placed in a real noisy environment. Voice is captured using a wireless microphone. Navigation Strategy is shown Obstacle detection and local map, Design of Goal-seeking Behavior and Avoidance Behavior, Fuzzy Decision Maker and Lower level controller. The final hypothesis is selected based on posterior probability. We then select the task in the motion task library. In the motion control, we also integrate the obstacle avoidance control using ultrasonic sensors. Those are powerful for detecting obstacle with simple algorithm.

• Archives of Plastic Surgery
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• v.51 no.1
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• pp.80-86
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• 2024

Background Among the cleft types, bilateral cleft lip and palate (BCLP) generally requires multiple surgical procedures and extended speech therapy to achieve normal speech development. This study aimed to describe speech outcomes in 5-year-old Korean children with BCLP and examine whether normal speech could be achieved before starting school. Methods The retrospective study analyzed 52 children with complete BCLP who underwent primary palatal surgery at a tertiary medical center. Three speech-language pathologists made perceptual judgments on recordings from a speech follow-up assessment of 5-year-old children. They assessed the children's speech in terms of articulation, speech intelligibility, resonance, and voice using the Cleft Audit Protocol for Speech-Augmented-Korean Modification. Results The results indicated that at the age of five, 65 to 70% of children with BCLP presented articulation and resonance within normal or acceptable ranges. Further, seven children with BCLP (13.5%) needed both additional speech therapy and palatal surgery for persistent velopharyngeal insufficiency and speech problems even at the age of five. Conclusion This study confirmed that routine follow-up speech assessments are essential as a substantial number of children with BCLP require secondary surgical procedures and extended speech therapy to achieve normal speech development.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.17 no.7
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• pp.467-474
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• 2016

This study is intended to look into the effects of children's problem behaviors on the coping strategies of teachers involved in early childhood education (ECE). To achieve this, a survey was administered to 90 teachers involved in ECE at kindergartens and child care centers in Daejeon Metropolitan City. The findings showed that these teachers have a professionalism and suitability for their career and excellent ability to cope with the problems of children in this age group. The results showed that competent teachers had less tendency to put children in the corner or give physical punishment to them than incompetent teachers. Competent teachers didn't use coping strategies involving scolding or saying no with a somewhat loud voice, but rather pointed to each word accurately or helped the children express their feelings and understand their situation. However, their coping strategies may not always be suitable in all situations. When necessary, saying no accurately with an accompanying warning is also important. Consequently, career and professional knowledge are important for teachers involved in ECE, and it would be useful to collate the diverse strategies that they use.

• Journal of the korean academy of Pediatric Dentistry
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• v.30 no.3
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• pp.341-347
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• 2003

Smith-Magenis syndrome (SMS) is a clinically recognizable multiple congenital anomaly and mental retardation syndrome caused by an interstitial deletion of chromosome 17 p11.2. Physical features include short stature, characteristic facial appearance: flattened mid-face, down-turned mouth, prominent and often rosy cheeks; prominent jaw in older children and adults, chronic ear infections, hearing impairment, eye problems, including: strabismus (an eye which turns in or out) and myopia (nearsightedness), hoarse voice, short fingers and toes, heart defects or murmurs, problems related to the urinary system, scoliosis (curvature of the spine), an unusual gait (walking pattern), and decreased sensitivity to pain. Behavioral and developmental characteristics include speech delay and articulation problems, developmental delay, learning disability, mental retardation, hyperactivity, self-injury, including: head banging; hand biting; picking at skin, sores and nails; pulling off finger- and toenails; inserting foreign objects into ears, nose, or other body orifices, explosive outbursts, prolonged tantrums, destructive and aggressive behavior, excitability, arm hugging or hand squeezing when excited. This report is the case of a Korean 3-year-3-month old male with Smith-Magenis syndrome referred from local clinic for the treatment of dental caries. The patient was treated by physical restraint after prophylatic administration of antibiotic(Amoxacillin 50mg/kg).

• Journal of The Korean Association of Information Education
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.191-201
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• 2004

In accordance with wide spread of personal computer and the expansion of network access, the use of internet has been popular and communication by text message is much more normal than that of voice and image. Accordingly, the side effect of communication language brings about gap between diverse social class, the isolation of communication between generations, abusive expressions, obstacles of juvenile mental development and so on. It appears by the form of slang and vulgar word and has a negative effect on education of mother tongue and usage of children's real language. To deal with these problems, we developed new web-based education system through the analysis of learners' requirement; "Barun Mal, Goeun Mal class". So we verified its efficiency to apply to real class. We also found that this system increased the learners' interest and educational effectiveness. Also, this system contributed to the proper use of language.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.53-69
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• 2011

Vision and voice-based technologies are commonly utilized for human-robot interaction. But it is widely recognized that the performance of vision and voice-based interaction systems is deteriorated by a large margin in the real-world situations due to environmental and user variances. Human users need to be very cooperative to get reasonable performance, which significantly limits the usability of the vision and voice-based human-robot interaction technologies. As a result, touch screens are still the major medium of human-robot interaction for the real-world applications. To empower the usability of robots for various services, alternative interaction technologies should be developed to complement the problems of vision and voice-based technologies. In this paper, we propose the use of accelerometer-based gesture interface as one of the alternative technologies, because accelerometers are effective in detecting the movements of human body, while their performance is not limited by environmental contexts such as lighting conditions or camera's field-of-view. Moreover, accelerometers are widely available nowadays in many mobile devices. We tackle the problem of classifying acceleration signal patterns of 26 English alphabets, which is one of the essential repertoires for the realization of education services based on robots. Recognizing 26 English handwriting patterns based on accelerometers is a very difficult task to take over because of its large scale of pattern classes and the complexity of each pattern. The most difficult problem that has been undertaken which is similar to our problem was recognizing acceleration signal patterns of 10 handwritten digits. Most previous studies dealt with pattern sets of 8~10 simple and easily distinguishable gestures that are useful for controlling home appliances, computer applications, robots etc. Good features are essential for the success of pattern recognition. To promote the discriminative power upon complex English alphabet patterns, we extracted 'motion trajectories' out of input acceleration signal and used them as the main feature. Investigative experiments showed that classifiers based on trajectory performed 3%~5% better than those with raw features e.g. acceleration signal itself or statistical figures. To minimize the distortion of trajectories, we applied a simple but effective set of smoothing filters and band-pass filters. It is well known that acceleration patterns for the same gesture is very different among different performers. To tackle the problem, online incremental learning is applied for our system to make it adaptive to the users' distinctive motion properties. Our system is based on instance-based learning (IBL) where each training sample is memorized as a reference pattern. Brute-force incremental learning in IBL continuously accumulates reference patterns, which is a problem because it not only slows down the classification but also downgrades the recall performance. Regarding the latter phenomenon, we observed a tendency that as the number of reference patterns grows, some reference patterns contribute more to the false positive classification. Thus, we devised an algorithm for optimizing the reference pattern set based on the positive and negative contribution of each reference pattern. The algorithm is performed periodically to remove reference patterns that have a very low positive contribution or a high negative contribution. Experiments were performed on 6500 gesture patterns collected from 50 adults of 30~50 years old. Each alphabet was performed 5 times per participant using $Nintendo{(R)}$ $Wii^{TM}$ remote. Acceleration signal was sampled in 100hz on 3 axes. Mean recall rate for all the alphabets was 95.48%. Some alphabets recorded very low recall rate and exhibited very high pairwise confusion rate. Major confusion pairs are D(88%) and P(74%), I(81%) and U(75%), N(88%) and W(100%). Though W was recalled perfectly, it contributed much to the false positive classification of N. By comparison with major previous results from VTT (96% for 8 control gestures), CMU (97% for 10 control gestures) and Samsung Electronics(97% for 10 digits and a control gesture), we could find that the performance of our system is superior regarding the number of pattern classes and the complexity of patterns. Using our gesture interaction system, we conducted 2 case studies of robot-based edutainment services. The services were implemented on various robot platforms and mobile devices including $iPhone^{TM}$. The participating children exhibited improved concentration and active reaction on the service with our gesture interface. To prove the effectiveness of our gesture interface, a test was taken by the children after experiencing an English teaching service. The test result showed that those who played with the gesture interface-based robot content marked 10% better score than those with conventional teaching. We conclude that the accelerometer-based gesture interface is a promising technology for flourishing real-world robot-based services and content by complementing the limits of today's conventional interfaces e.g. touch screen, vision and voice.