• Journal of the Ergonomics Society of Korea
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• v.36 no.3
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• pp.183-196
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• 2017

Objective: The purpose of this research was to assess the agreement between job physical risk factor analysis by ergonomists using ergonomic methods and physical examinations made by occupational physicians on the presence of musculoskeletal disorders of the upper extremities. Background: Ergonomics is the systematic application of principles concerned with the design of devices and working conditions for enhancing human capabilities and optimizing working and living conditions. Proper ergonomic design is necessary to prevent injuries and physical and emotional stress. The major types of ergonomic injuries and incidents are cumulative trauma disorders (CTDs), acute strains, sprains, and system failures. Minimization of use of excessive force and awkward postures can help to prevent such injuries Method: Initial data were collected as part of a larger study by the University of Utah Ergonomics and Safety program field data collection teams and medical data collection teams from the Rocky Mountain Center for Occupational and Environmental Health (RMCOEH). Subjects included 173 male and female workers, 83 at Beehive Clothing (a clothing plant), 74 at Autoliv (a plant making air bags for vehicles), and 16 at Deseret Meat (a meat-processing plant). Posture and effort levels were analyzed using a software program developed at the University of Utah (Utah Ergonomic Analysis Tool). The Ergonomic Epicondylitis Model (EEM) was developed to assess the risk of epicondylitis from observable job physical factors. The model considers five job risk factors: (1) intensity of exertion, (2) forearm rotation, (3) wrist posture, (4) elbow compression, and (5) speed of work. Qualitative ratings of these physical factors were determined during video analysis. Personal variables were also investigated to study their relationship with epicondylitis. Logistic regression models were used to determine the association between risk factors and symptoms of epicondyle pain. Results: Results of this study indicate that gender, smoking status, and BMI do have an effect on the risk of epicondylitis but there is not a statistically significant relationship between EEM and epicondylitis. Conclusion: This research studied the relationship between an Ergonomic Epicondylitis Model (EEM) and the occurrence of epicondylitis. The model was not predictive for epicondylitis. However, it is clear that epicondylitis was associated with some individual risk factors such as smoking status, gender, and BMI. Based on the results, future research may discover risk factors that seem to increase the risk of epicondylitis. Application: Although this research used a combination of questionnaire, ergonomic job analysis, and medical job analysis to specifically verify risk factors related to epicondylitis, there are limitations. This research did not have a very large sample size because only 173 subjects were available for this study. Also, it was conducted in only 3 facilities, a plant making air bags for vehicles, a meat-processing plant, and a clothing plant in Utah. If working conditions in other kinds of facilities are considered, results may improve. Therefore, future research should perform analysis with additional subjects in different kinds of facilities. Repetition and duration of a task were not considered as risk factors in this research. These two factors could be associated with epicondylitis so it could be important to include these factors in future research. Psychosocial data and workplace conditions (e.g., low temperature) were also noted during data collection, and could be used to further study the prevalence of epicondylitis. Univariate analysis methods could be used for each variable of EEM. This research was performed using multivariate analysis. Therefore, it was difficult to recognize the different effect of each variable. Basically, the difference between univariate and multivariate analysis is that univariate analysis deals with one predictor variable at a time, whereas multivariate analysis deals with multiple predictor variables combined in a predetermined manner. The univariate analysis could show how each variable is associated with epicondyle pain. This may allow more appropriate weighting factors to be determined and therefore improve the performance of the EEM.

• The Journal of Engineering Research
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.199-205
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• 1998

Cullet Quality Control in auto glass bottle factory is the most important in recent days because of the increasing cost of materials in glass bottle. Since the composition of plate glass cullet is similar, the cullet quality using plate cullet in glass bottle factory is easily controlled. In addition to this, the price of plate glass cullet is so low that the cost reduction can be achieved. If the ratio of plate glass cullet and gush is over 25%, the liquidity of glass water become worse, which is caused by different compositions and viscosity of the components. As a results, Furnace bottom temperature becomes low and glass water becomes inhomogeneous. Thus production efficiency of glass bottle becomes low because of increasing devitrification in Dead Corner part in glass melting furnace. Three experimental methods – (1) increasing melting temperature, (2) using Booster, (3) using bubbler – were performed to increase the furnace bottom temperature and glass water homogeneity. The amounts of plate glass cullet was able to increase up to 90%, 70% and 60% without any devitrification using booster, bubbler and the method of glass melting temperature increase from $1480^{\circ}C$ to $1560^{\circ}C$ respectively. It is not possible to increase the glass melting temperature without the reduction of furnace operation time and the increase of fuel cost. The booster process has disadvantage of much electric energy consumption. Since the bubbler process uses physical convection of melting glass based on compression air, the homogeneity of molten glass is not so good as that of booster process but it can reduce the cost of glass bottle.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.77-83
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• 2015

Frequent pattern mining, which is one of the major areas actively studied in data mining, is a method for extracting useful pattern information hidden from large data sets or databases. Moreover, frequent pattern mining approaches have been actively employed in a variety of application fields because the results obtained from them can allow us to analyze various, important characteristics within databases more easily and automatically. However, traditional frequent pattern mining methods, which simply extract all of the possible frequent patterns such that each of their support values is not smaller than a user-given minimum support threshold, have the following problems. First, traditional approaches have to generate a numerous number of patterns according to the features of a given database and the degree of threshold settings, and the number can also increase in geometrical progression. In addition, such works also cause waste of runtime and memory resources. Furthermore, the pattern results excessively generated from the methods also lead to troubles of pattern analysis for the mining results. In order to solve such issues of previous traditional frequent pattern mining approaches, the concept of representative pattern mining and its various related works have been proposed. In contrast to the traditional ones that find all the possible frequent patterns from databases, representative pattern mining approaches selectively extract a smaller number of patterns that represent general frequent patterns. In this paper, we describe details and characteristics of pattern condensing techniques that consider the maximality or closure property of generated frequent patterns, and conduct comparison and analysis for the techniques. Given a frequent pattern, satisfying the maximality for the pattern signifies that all of the possible super sets of the pattern must have smaller support values than a user-specific minimum support threshold; meanwhile, satisfying the closure property for the pattern means that there is no superset of which the support is equal to that of the pattern with respect to all the possible super sets. By mining maximal frequent patterns or closed frequent ones, we can achieve effective pattern compression and also perform mining operations with much smaller time and space resources. In addition, compressed patterns can be converted into the original frequent pattern forms again if necessary; especially, the closed frequent pattern notation has the ability to convert representative patterns into the original ones again without any information loss. That is, we can obtain a complete set of original frequent patterns from closed frequent ones. Although the maximal frequent pattern notation does not guarantee a complete recovery rate in the process of pattern conversion, it has an advantage that can extract a smaller number of representative patterns more quickly compared to the closed frequent pattern notation. In this paper, we show the performance results and characteristics of the aforementioned techniques in terms of pattern generation, runtime, and memory usage by conducting performance evaluation with respect to various real data sets collected from the real world. For more exact comparison, we also employ the algorithms implementing these techniques on the same platform and Implementation level.