MoS2 -Based Tactile Sensor for Electronic Skin Applications.

A conformal tactile sensor based on MoS2 and graphene is demonstrated. The MoS2 tactile sensor exhibits excellent sensitivity, high uniformity, and good repeatability in terms of various strains. In addition, the outstanding flexibility enables the MoS2 strain tactile sensor to be realized conformally on a finger tip. The MoS2 -based tactile sensor can be utilized for wearable electronics, such as electronic skin.

Development of an auditory emotion recognition function using psychoacoustic parameters based on the International Affective Digitized Sounds.

The purpose of this study was to develop an auditory emotion recognition function that could determine the emotion caused by sounds coming from the environment in our daily life. For this purpose, sound stimuli from the International Affective Digitized Sounds (IADS-2), a standardized database of sounds intended to evoke emotion, were selected, and four psychoacoustic parameters (i.e., loudness, sharpness, roughness, and fluctuation strength) were extracted from the sounds. Also, by using an emotion adjective scale, 140 college students were tested to measure three basic emotions (happiness, sadness, and negativity). From this discriminant analysis to predict basic emotions from the psychoacoustic parameters of sound, a discriminant function with overall discriminant accuracy of 88.9% was produced from training data. In order to validate the discriminant function, the same four psychoacoustic parameters were extracted from 46 sound stimuli collected from another database and substituted into the discriminant function. The results showed that an overall discriminant accuracy of 63.04% was confirmed. Our findings provide the possibility that daily-life sounds, beyond voice and music, can be used in a human-machine interface.

Quantitative Sasang Constitution Diagnosis Method for Distinguishing between Tae-eumin and Soeumin Types Based on Elasticity Measurements of the Skin of the Human Hand.

The usefulness of constitutional diagnoses based on skin measurements has been established in oriental medicine. However, it is very difficult to standardize traditional diagnosis methods. According to Sasang constitutional medicine, humans can be distinguished based on properties of the skin, including its texture, roughness, hardness and elasticity. The elasticity of the skin was previously used to distinguish between people with Tae-eumin (TE) and Soeumin (SE) constitutions. The present study designed a system that uses a compression method to measure the elasticity of hand skin and evaluated its measurement repeatability. The proposed system was used to compare the skin elasticity between SE and TE subjects, which produced a measurement repeatability error of <3%. The proposed system is suitable for use as a quantitative constitution diagnosis method for distinguishing between TE and SE subjects with an acceptable level of uncertainty.

The development of the friction coefficient inspection equipment for skin using a load cell.

The skin is an indispensible organ for human because it contributes to the metabolism using its own biochemical functions as well as it protects the human body from the exterior stimuli. Recently, the friction coefficient have been used as the decision index of the progress for the bacterial aliments in the field of the skin physiology and the importance of friction coefficient have been increased in the skin care market because of the needs of the well being times. In addition, the usage of friction coefficient is known to have the big discrimination ability in classification of human constitutions, which is utilized in the alternative medicine. In this study, we designed a system which used the multi axes load cell and hemi-circular probe and tried to measure the friction coefficient of hand skins repeatedly. Using this system, the relative repeatability error for the measurement of the friction coefficient was below 4 %. The coefficient is not concerned in curvatures of tips. Using this system, we will try to establish the standard for classification of constitutions.

The development of a blood pressure simulator in KRISS.

Blood pressure is defined as the amount of force at unit area which the blood exerts on a wall of a blood vessel. The BP has a clinical importance as the basic index in the medical examination of patients. Especially, the percentage of the hypertensive is more than 15% in an adult population of Korea and hypertension is notorious as 'a silent killer' because it has no prior symptoms. The most important thing in the diagnosis, treatment and prognosis of hypertension is the accurate measurement of the BP. In this study, we developed the blood pressure simulator for the monitoring of oscillometric BP devices and compared this KRISS simulator with commercial simulators. Finally, we tested the commercial oscillometric BP devices (6 models from 5 manufacturers) using the KRISS simulator. The KRISS simulator has the repeatability error below 0.1% for the pressure generation and we expected to develop the BP simulator for Korean by the collection of clinical data from Koreans.