• Safety and Health at Work
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• 제15권1호
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• pp.96-101
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• 2024

Background: Silicosis among workers who fabricate engineered stone products in micro or small-sized enterprises (MSEs) was reported from several countries. Workplace exposure data of these workers at high risk of exposure to respirable crystalline silica (RCS) dust are limited. Methods: We surveyed workers performing cutting, shaping and polishing tasks at 6 engineered stone fabricating MSEs in Sydney, Australia prior to regulatory intervention. Personal exposure to airborne RCS dust in 34 workers was measured, work practices were observed using a checklist and worker demography recorded. Results: Personal respirable dust measurements showed exposures above the Australian workplace exposure standard (WES) of 0.1 mg/m³ TWA-8 hours for RCS in 85% of workers who performed dry tasks and amongst 71% using water-fed tools. Dust exposure controls were inadequate with ineffective ventilation and inappropriate respiratory protection. All 34 workers sampled were identified as overseas-born migrants, mostly from three linguistic groups. Conclusions: Workplace exposure data from this survey showed that workers in engineered stone fabricating MSEs were exposed to RCS dust levels which may be associated with a high risk of developing silicosis. The survey findings were useful to inform a comprehensive regulatory intervention program involving diverse hazard communication tools and enforcing improved exposure controls. We conclude that modest occupational hygiene surveys in MSEs, with attention to workers' demographic factors can influence the effectiveness of intervention programs. Occupational health practitioners should address these potential determinants of hazardous exposures in their workplace surveys to prevent illness such as silicosis in vulnerable workers.

• 한국산업보건학회지
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• 제32권4호
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• pp.287-301
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• 2022

Objectives: This study compared the characteristics of the work environment between agricultural and general workers and analyzed the effects of agricultural working characteristics on work-related health problems. Methods: The participants of this study were 2,347 agricultural workers and 48,042 general workers who were selected by applying standardized weights to the raw data of 50,538 respondents from the 6th Korean Working Condition Survey (KWCS). Variables applicable to both worker groups and related to exposure to hazardous risk factors in the working environment, working hours and intensity of work, health problems and work-related status, and satisfaction with the work environment were selected. Chi-square tests and independent sample t-tests were performed to evaluate the differences in the variables between the two groups. Multivariate logistic regression analysis was conducted to analyze the effects of work environment characteristics on work-related health problems. Results: Compared to general workers, agricultural workers were more exposed to hazardous environments, irregular work patterns such as working on Saturday/Sunday, and short repetitive tasks. They reported more work-related and general health problems, including back pain, upper extremity muscle pain, lower extremity muscle pain, and general fatigue. Agricultural workers showed lower satisfaction with their work environment than general workers. Factors affecting one or more work-related health problems included gender, working years, hazardous factors, irregular work pattern, working hours, and labor intensity. Conclusions: Our findings showed that agricultural workers were relatively more vulnerable to safety issues compared to other occupational groups. Therefore, it is necessary to establish standardized safety and health standards and strengthen systematic safety and health management policies and services for agriculture.

• 한국직업건강간호학회지
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• 제6권2호
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• pp.79-95
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• 1997

The purposes of this study were to develop a job stress measurement tool and to identify the job stress according to the characteristics of worker and work condition at the small and medium-sized plants. Data were collected through face-to-face survey for April-May, 1997. Subjects were 180 workers at 36 small and medium-sized plants located near Seoul. Data were analyzed by item analysis, factor analysis, and ANOVA. The results were as follow : 1, Number of items of job stress measurement were 33 and Cronbach's $\alpha$ was .9262 except 13 items with low values of Cronbach's coefficient. Factor analysis was done in order for construct validity and 8 factors were extracted and cumulative percent of variance was 65.6%. 2. The job stress scores of male, the younger, 2-shift workers, and over-time workers were significantly higher than those of female, the older, 1-shift workers, and 48 hour workers per week. 3. There were no significant difference between job stress scores and the groups by number of worker, and the types of manufacturing. The stress measurement tool is valid and very reliable to measure worker's stress. Furthermore, the job stress managent program for health promotion of the workers at the vulnerable work condition is needed more and more.

• 한국안전학회지
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• 제28권5호
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• pp.27-34
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• 2013

Almost accidents in construction sites are occurred by unsafe work conditions and failure making safe environment. As recent construction projects become more complex, various and diversified, So the potential of construction-related accidents is increased as well. Comparing the frequency of construction-related accidents in large-sized construction sites, small-sized construction sites are more vulnerable because of lack of workforce and less effective technology system. Furthermore, the absence of safety committee, poor financial condition leads to lack of safety education, installation of safety facilities, and provision of individual protective equipment, which indicates difficulties handling even basic safety management. Therefore, in order to lower the hazard rate at small-Sized construction sites, it is necessary to proceed with more structural and thorough actions for preventing accidents. In other words, it is necessary to analyze the causes of the accidents at small-sized construction sites, set criteria for safety management, and suggest safety management items according to work classification by evaluating the relative importance of the items.

• 경영과학
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• 제28권1호
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• pp.107-116
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• 2011

The automated teller machine (ATM) is developed as a system to provide customers with an easy deposit and withdrawal of their money without time restriction and be served for 24 hours. Today, ATM is come up to the level of an unmanned branch. The automatic financing system is developed as an essential one for dealing with the rationalization of management and the globalization of financing in order to improve the efficiency of financial management work and increase the customer service quality. With reducing the operational cost of financial organizations through the efficient maintenance operation of ATM and increasing the service quality through the maximization of its processing efficiency, this study is to draw the scheme to ensure the competitiveness among the finance companies. The importance of ATM is highly recognized as the utilization of ATM is increased and the processing function is extended, but ATM is quite vulnerable to the malfunction occurred during the nighttime after banking hours. The ATM maintenance is done through consignment to the specialized maintenance company. The efficient operation of ATM maintenance work is important to the satisfaction of customer using ATM in the nighttime.

• Safety and Health at Work
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• 제7권1호
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• pp.1-5
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• 2016

Background: Several studies have investigated the relationship between specific occupations and suicide mortality, as suicide rates differ by profession. The aim of this study was to investigate suicide mortality ratios across broad occupational groups in Greece for both sexes in the period 2000-2009. Methods: Data of suicide deaths were retrieved from the Hellenic Statistical Authority and comparative mortality ratios were calculated. Occupational classification was based on the International Classification of Occupations (ISCO-88) and the coding for Intentional self-harm (X60-X84) was based on the international classification of diseases (ICD-10). Results: Male dominant occupations, mainly armed forces, skilled farmers and elementary workers, and female high-skilled occupations were seen as high risk groups for suicide in a period of 10 years. The age-productive group of 30-39 years in Greek male elementary workers and the 50-59 age-productive group of Greek professional women proved to have the most elevated number of suicide deaths. Conclusion: Further research is needed into the work-related stressors of occupations with high suicide mortality risk and focused suicide prevention strategies should be applied within vulnerable working age populations.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• 제15권12호
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• pp.4508-4530
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• 2021

Today distributed data storage service are being widely used. However lack of proper means of security makes the user data vulnerable. In this work, we propose a Randomized Block Size (RBS) model for secure data storage in distributed environments. The model work with multifold block sizes encrypted with the Chinese Remainder Theorem-based RSA (C-RSA) technique for end-to-end security of multimedia data. The proposed RBS model has a key generation phase (KGP) for constructing asymmetric keys, and a rand generation phase (RGP) for applying optimal asymmetric encryption padding (OAEP) to the original message. The experimental results obtained with text and image files show that the post encryption file size is not much affected, and data is efficiently encrypted while storing at the distributed storage server (DSS). The parameters such as ciphertext size, encryption time, and throughput have been considered for performance evaluation, whereas statistical analysis like similarity measurement, correlation coefficient, histogram, and entropy analysis uses to check image pixels deviation. The number of pixels change rate (NPCR) and unified averaged changed intensity (UACI) were used to check the strength of the proposed encryption technique. The proposed model is robust with high resilience against eavesdropping, insider attack, and chosen-plaintext attack.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• 제16권5호
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• pp.1687-1707
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• 2022

With the development of multiuser online meetings, more group-oriented technologies and applications for instance collaborative work are becoming increasingly important. Authenticated Group Key Agreement (AGKA) schemes provide a shared group key for users with after their identities are confirmed to guarantee the confidentiality and integrity of group communications. On the basis of the Public Key Cryptography (PKC) system used, AGKA can be classified as Public Key Infrastructure-based, Identity-based, and Certificateless. Because the latter type can solve the certificate management overhead and the key escrow problems of the first two types, Certificateless-AGKA (CL-AGKA) protocols have become a popular area of research. However, most CL-AGKA protocols are vulnerable to Public Key Replacement Attacks (PKRA) due to the lack of public key authentication. In the present work, we present a CL-AGKA scheme that can resist PKRA in order to solve impersonation attacks caused by those attacks. Beyond security, improving scheme efficiency is another direction for AGKA research. To reduce the communication and computation cost, we present a scheme with only one round of information interaction and construct a CL-AGKA scheme replacing the bilinear pairing with elliptic curve cryptography. Therefore, our scheme has good applicability to communication environments with limited bandwidth and computing capabilities.

• 대한인간공학회지
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• 제30권4호
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• pp.541-550
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• 2011

Objective: The objective of this study is to present varying cases of ergonomic improvements in equipments for agricultural work. Background: In Korean agricultural sector, many older people and females, who may be more vulnerable to musculoskeletal diseases than young males, are doing high stressful tasks such as manual materials tasks, harvesting, etc. For reducing the work stress of the farmers, the Korean government has been performing support projects to provide the farmers with agricultural implements specified for their crops. In the projects, ergonomics experts have participated and helped modify the equipments. Method: Fifty cases of equipment improvements, which were carried out in 33 farming organizations cultivating 13 different crops, were reviewed and presented by equipments and their parts. Results: In total, 283 cases of improvements for 12 equipments including 4-wheel, 1-wheel, and 3-wheel powered carts, grass cutter, conveyer, pest control machine, and so on, were presented. The improvements were also classified according to the ergonomic principles like compatibility, ease of use, safety and fitting to the anthropometry, etc. Frequencies of improvements by equipment and its part were the highest in carts and controls, respectively. Principles of safety and ease of use were adopted more frequently in improving equipments than others. Conclusion: The tables of examples of improvements of agricultural implements are main results of this study and the systematical summaries are expected to be widely used in the development of more improved agricultural implements. Application: The results could be used as practical guidelines in ergonomically developing and modifying agricultural implements by both the experts and non-experts in ergonomics. The improvements would contribute to reduction of stress in farm work, which result in increasing the level of safety and health of Korean agricultural society.

• Safety and Health at Work
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• 제11권2호
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• pp.159-164
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• 2020

Background: This study aimed to examine the association between educational level and unable to work due to ill-health (UWdIH) among 30- to 79-year-old South Koreans. Methods: A cross-sectional nationwide survey of the 2010-2016 Korea National Health and Nutritional Evaluation Survey was used for analyses. A total of 29,930 participants aged ≥30 and < 80 years, who do not have any disability in their daily life because of health problems, were included. Educational level and reason for nonworking are self-reported with multiple choices. Multivariate logistic regression was used to examine an association between education level and UWdIH by setting those who graduated college as their final education (n = 6,997) as a baseline while controlling for potential confounding factors. Results: In the age-stratified result, the ratio of UWdIH was increased as age increases in 3 educational groups (p < .0001). There was a tendency that low-level educated [International Standard Classification of Education (0-2)] participants showed higher ratio of UWdIH than high-level educated [International Standard Classification of Education (5≤)] participants in both sexes (odds ratio: 2.54, 95% confidence interval: 2.12-3.05). Conclusion: There is a clear link between educational level and UWdIH; the less the educated, the more likely to be UWdIH. Policy priority should be given to plans that can help this vulnerable social group to work and enjoy healthy lives.