• Health Policy and Management
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.115-131
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• 2011

Several common issues are encountered by countries - Germany, Japan, and the United States - that adopted long-term care (LTC) system. First, the demand for LTC and its associated costs have steeply risen following the implementation of the LTC policy. Second, ensuring the quality of services have been difficult. Third, the coordination of services among providers and between LTC and medical care has been inadequate. Learning from their experience, we suggest ways to improve the LTC system in Korea. The basic approach aims for efficiency over equity in the system. This would require promoting provider competition and consumer choice. We propose several policy options according to the major stakeholders. For consumers, cash benefits at fixed rates and personal savings accounts are feasible options to self-contain the demand and cost of services. On the insurer's side, creating an environment of multiple insurers will engender competition, leading to cost savings and quality care. For providers, delivery of quality services through competition, cost-containment through capitated reimbursements, and coordination of services through integrated delivery system can be achieved. From the assessors' perspective, establishing an information system to monitor the activities of insurers and providers would be important, empowering consumers with information to choose cost-effective service providers. In summary, the suggested approach would provide cost-effective LTC services by guaranteeing consumer choice and promoting major stakeholder accountability. Further studies are needed to test the feasibility of this model in ensuring quality LTC in Korea.

• Journal of Powder Materials
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.12-18
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• 2018

Cost-effective functional phosphor nanoparticles are prepared by introducing low-cost $SiO_2$ spheres to rare-earth phosphor ($YVO_4:Eu^{3+}$, $YVO_4:Er^{3+}$, and $YVO_4:Nd^{3+}$) shells using a sol-gel synthetic method. These functional nanoparticles are characterized by X-ray diffraction, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, transmission electron microscopy, and general photoluminescence spectra. The $SiO_2$ sphere occupying the interior of the conventional phosphor is advantageous in significantly reducing the cost of expensive rare-earth phosphor nanoparticles. The sol-gel process facilitates the core-shell structure formation; the rare-earth shell phosphor has strong interactions with chelating agents on the surfaces of $SiO_2$ nanoparticles and thus forms layers of several nanometers in thickness. The photoluminescence wavelength is simply tuned by replacing the active materials of $Eu^{3+}$, $Er^{3+}$, and $Nd^{3+}$. Moreover, the photoluminescent properties of the core-shell nanoparticles can be optimized by manipulating the specific contents of active materials in the phosphors. Our simple approach substitutes low-cost $SiO_2$ for expensive rare-earth-based phosphor materials to realize cost-effective phosphor nanoparticles for various applications.

• The Journal of the Institute of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.97-107
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• 2012

The Internet is becoming increasingly diverse and complex, the needs of user's convenience is also various and increased. The task forces have been working on how to design the future Internet in satisfaction of user's require and mobility management is one of the key issues to be considered. mobility management in the future Internet is still being designed in an "all-in-one" way where all management functions are tightly kept at a single location and this results in cost inefficiency that can be an obstruction to constructing flexible systems. In this paper, we propose a cost-effective function-distributed mobility management scheme that can enable more flexible future Internet construction. Furthermore, we show the effectiveness of our proposed system via a cost analysis and computer simulation with a random walk mobility model.

• Journal of The Korean Society of Integrative Medicine
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.13-25
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• 2022

Purpose : This study compared the cost-effectiveness ratio of physical therapy in health centers and home physical therapy, two physical therapy methods for home-bound stroke patients, and clarified the economic validity regarding the effect of home physical therapy. Methods : To measure and compare the cost and effectiveness of the two physical therapy methods for stroke patients, subjects were recruited based on in-hospital and home physical therapy. Among the entire data collected, 82 and 90 participants were selected for in-hospital and home physical therapy, respectively. To measure costs, regarding both in-hospital and home physical therapy, direct cost and indirect cost for patients, family, medical institutes, and the government were measured. In addition, activities of daily living were measured in both methods to measure their effectiveness. Through collected data, the cost-effectiveness and incremental cost-effectiveness ratios were analyzed. Results : Based on the analysis of cost-effectiveness, home physical therapy showed lower cost-effectiveness than in-hospital physical therapy. Furthermore, the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio also showed a difference, which implied home physical therapy could have high effectiveness compared to cost. Conclusion : Based on these results, home physical therapy could be considered as an alternativeto other methods of physical therapy, for home-bound stroke patients. In addition, the result of thisstudy contribute by providing evidence that home physical therapy offers economic benefits and canbe more effective in treating home-bound patients when policy decisions are made to establish a home physical therapy system.

• International conference on construction engineering and project management
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• 2022.06a
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• pp.590-598
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• 2022

Benchmarking is an important tool to assess the performance of capital projects in the construction industry. Incorporating cost-related metrics into a benchmarking system requires an effective cost normalization process to enable meaningful comparisons among projects that were executed at different locations and times. Projects in the downstream and chemicals sector have unique characteristics compared to other types of construction projects, they require a distinctive cost normalization framework to be developed to benchmark their absolute cost performance. The purpose of this study is to develop such a framework to be used for the case of benchmarking the downstream and chemical projects for their performance assessment. The research team started with a review of existing cost normalization methodologies adopted in benchmarking systems and conducted 7 interviews to identify the current cost normalization practices used by industrial professionals. A panel of 12 experts was then convened and it held 6 review sessions to accomplish the framework development. The cost normalization framework for benchmarking downstream and chemical projects was established as a three-step procedure and it adopts a 4-element cost breakdown structure to accommodate projects submitted by both owners and contractors. It also incorporated 5 published cost indexes that are compatible with downstream and chemical projects and they were embedded into 2 options to complete the normalization process. The framework was then pilot-tested on 4 completed projects to validate its functional practicality and the downstream and chemical use case in the benchmarking system.

• Proceedings of the KSR Conference
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• 2011.05a
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• pp.505-510
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• 2011

The railroad freight transport has great merits that can transport mass and specific items(dangerous goods), but it takes a long time because of low accessibility to the logistics facility and the complex process of loading freight in middle station. This paper analyzed volumes and characters of each railroad freight item, and was carried out the effect of applying E&S system to Gyeongbu line containers to find the method of reducing transport time and effective container transportation. As a result of Cost-Effectiveness analysis, the block train(B/T) is reducing transport time more about 1~2 hours. The road congestion cost is saving about 2.2 billion won. And due to skipping work of organizing train, personnel and equipment expenses savings expected about 9 billion won. It is expected that the E&S system enhances the container transport service and has an effect positive influence on making a efficient method of transport. But It is necessary to estimate pre-feasibility of applying E&S system that the standard of estimating cost and benefit is required further examination.

• IE interfaces
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.507-514
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• 2003

In personal communication systems location management of mobile terminals is required to connect incoming calls to the mobile terminals. Investigation of effective location update and paging strategies is important to reduce the cost of location management. In this study, we propose a paging strategy considering the mobile terminals' residence patterns. The first paging area is characterized by the set of cells in the location area where mobile terminals usually stay for a significant period of time. The rest of cells in the location area are included into the second paging area. To reduce the paging cost the first paging area is decided by reflecting various residence patterns of mobile terminals. For an incoming call, the sequential paging is performed in the order of the paging area. Thus the paging cost is greatly reduced, especially when the called mobile terminal is located in the first paging area. The proposed strategy is expected to be more effective than an existing strategy that uses the anchor cell in the location area.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics C
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• v.34C no.7
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• pp.38-50
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• 1997

This paper concerns a VHDL design and simulation of an accurate and cost-effective fuzzy logic controller (FLC). The accurcy of the proposed FLC is obtained by using the center of gravity (COG) defuzzifier that considers both membership values and spans of membership functions in calculating a crisp value. The cost-effectiveness of the proposed FLC is obtained by restructuring the conventional FLC in the following ways: Firstly, the MAX-MIN inference is inference is replaced by a read-modify-write operation that can be implemented economically in the structure of register files. Secondly, the division in the COG defuzzifier is avoided by finding the moment equilibrium point. The proposed COG defuzzifier has two disadvantages that it requires additional multipliers and it takes a lot of computation time to find the moment equilibrium point. The first disadvantage is overcome by replacing the mulitpliers with stochastic AND operations and the second disadvantage is alleviated by using a coarse-to-fine searching algorithm. The proposed FLC is described in VHDL structurally and behaviorally and whether it is working well or not is checked on SYNOPSYS VHDL simulator by using the truck backer-upper control problem.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Electromagnetic Engineering and Science
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• v.8 no.5
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• pp.534-544
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• 1997

The permittivity distribution of a two-dimensional high-contrast object with large size, which leads to the global minimum of cost function, is reconstructed by iteratively using the hybrid algorithm of Levenberg-magquardt algorithm(LMA) plus Genetic Algorithm(GA). The scattered fields calculated in a cost function are expanded in angular spectral modes, of which only effective propagating modes are used. The definition of cost function based on the effective propagating modes enables us to formulate the minimum number of incident waves for the reconstruction of object. It is numerically shown that LMA has an advantage of fast convergence but can't reconstruct a high-contrast object with large size and GA can reconstruct a high-contrast object with large size but has an disadvantage of slow convergence, whereas an inverse scattering technique using the hybrid algorithm adopts only advantages of LMA and GA.

• The Transactions of the Korea Information Processing Society
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.406-416
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• 1995

This paper is concerned with a routing protocol for cost-effective communications between mobile hosts on computer networks in which mobile hosts can move freely their physical positions. The proposed routing protocol consists of two protocols : one is called location registration protocol performing registration of the location information as the mobile host does move; the other one is called message transfer protocol which actually delivers a message to the destination mobile host. The detailed protocol's operational behavior and major characteristics are presented. And it is shown that our protocols are superior to previous ones, in terms of the communication cost(i.e, number of messages) required for routing a message, and are functionally improved ones.