RESUMO
Sitting for an extended time may cause a serious chronic disease such as a musculoskeletal disorder, or a cardiovascular disease, diabetes, or obesity. Because a consistently improper posture from early childhood to adolescence can have a number of undesirable effects on the formation of the musculoskeletal structure, learning to maintain a correct posture should be emphasized. A consistently improper posture can not only cause physical problems, it may also lead to emotional issues such as distractions, an attention deficit, and hyperactivity, and the possibility of a low efficiency and performance on assignments is high when the students have a low concentration. The present study implemented a distracted estimation system based on sensor fusion through correlation analysis with concentration that could estimate the level of distraction and prevent musculoskeletal diseases caused by poor sitting posture habits in daily life. The implemented system was designed in the form of a sitting cushion to reflect the ethological movements and characteristics of a sitting position that modern people spend a large amount of time in, and can be easily applied to existing chairs. Both algorithms installed in the system detected the center of gravity of the seated person and displayed positional changes that occurred based on the intensity of the postural changes when moving; thus, simultaneous determination of posture and impulsive behavior was possible. To evaluate the system performance, a posture determination evaluation was conducted, along with distraction estimation according to the rate of changes in posture that occur in everyday life. In addition, to evaluate performance in daily life, a movie-watching scenario was set up, and the distracted-limit estimation and concentration indices according to the rate of changes in posture were comparatively evaluated by reviewing a video of the subjects. The results of the posture determination performance evaluation through 100 posture repetitions on 10 subjects showed a high detection performance of 99.04%. The Pearson's correlation coefficient results showed a high correlation coefficient (inverse) of r = -0.975076 and a P-VALUE = 1.654 × 10 - 6 . This experiment objectively confirmed the correlation between the DLE Index (based on postural change) and the CI Index (based on EEG).
RESUMO
BACKGROUND: Increased pricing of cigarettes might be one of the most effective approaches for reducing the prevalence of smoking. This study aimed to investigate the effects of increasing cigarette prices through taxation by a tobacco intervention policy on the changes in smoking prevalence in Korean university students. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The participants in this study were 23,047 healthy university students aged 18-29 years from a health examination in 2011-2015. We investigated the adjusted prevalence of daily and occasional smoking before and after increasing cigarette prices through taxation. RESULTS: The prevalence of occasional smoking was significantly decreased in 2015 from 2014 in both male (from 10.7% in 2014 to 5.4%) and female (from 3.6% to 1.1%) students, but the prevalence of daily smoking did not decrease significantly. The frequency of individuals who had attempted smoking cessation during the past year was significantly higher among occasional smokers in male students (90.2%) compared with daily smokers (64.9%). For female students, there were no differences in experience of smoking cessation, willingness for smoking cessation, or E-cigarette experience between daily and occasional smokers. CONCLUSIONS: We found that a policy of increasing cigarette prices through taxation is associated with decreases in the prevalence of occasional smokers, who have relatively lower nicotine dependence compared with individuals who smoke daily. The results of our study suggest that social support and direct intervention for smoking cessation at the community level are needed for university students alongside the pricing policy.