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Objectives: This study aimed to identify effects of stressors and psychological adaptation of foreign workers on sleep quality.Methods: Data from 97 participants at the Busan Foreign Residents Center were included in the final analysis. The questionnaire consisted of sociodemographic characteristics, health behaviors, job related characteristics, stressors, psychological adaptation, and sleep quality. Hierarchical linear regression analysis was performed to identify factors affecting sleep quality using SPSS 28.0 program.Results: There was no significant difference in sleep quality according to demographic characteristics such as gender, age, and education. In the case of health characteristics, sleep quality was poor when current or past smoking and subjective health status were moderate or unhealthy. As a result of the correlation analysis among stressors, psychological adaptation, and sleep quality, sleep quality was positively correlated with family stress (r = 0.21, p< 0.05) and psychological adaptation (r = 0.34, p< 0.01). As a result of hierarchical linear regression analysis, non-smoking (β= -0.25, p< 0.05) and salary of 1.5 million won or more (β= -0.34, p< 0.001) were factors that improved sleep quality, while psychological adjustment difficulties (β= 0.33, p< 0.01) was a factor that deteriorated the quality of sleep.Conclusions: We confirmed that smoking status, wage level, and psychological adjustment are important factors affecting sleep quality. It is proposed to operate a comprehensive mental health program for improvement of sleep quality for foreign workers.

Thin, sensitive skin electronics The properties of the human sense of touch, including high sensitivity to differences in temperature, pressure, or surface roughness, are challenging to replicate in robotics because skin materials must be highly conductive, stretchable, and thin. Jung et al . developed a process to assemble nanomaterials as a monolayer that is partially embedded in an ultrathin elastomer. The process works by depositing a mixed solvent containing nanostructured silver and/or gold, along with elastomer, onto deionized water. This results in a layer of nanoparticles residing at the interface coating with elastomer, which is further densified by the addition of surfactant. The process is scalable, and the resulting elastomer membranes can be transferred to other substrates. —MSL

Conventional imaging and recognition systems require an extensive amount of data storage, pre-processing, and chip-to-chip communications as well as aberration-proof light focusing with multiple lenses for recognizing an object from massive optical inputs. This is because separate chips (i.e., flat image sensor array, memory device, and CPU) in conjunction with complicated optics should capture, store, and process massive image information independently. In contrast, human vision employs a highly efficient imaging and recognition process. Here, inspired by the human visual recognition system, we present a novel imaging device for efficient image acquisition and data pre-processing by conferring the neuromorphic data processing function on a curved image sensor array. The curved neuromorphic image sensor array is based on a heterostructure of MoS2 and poly(1,3,5-trimethyl-1,3,5-trivinyl cyclotrisiloxane). The curved neuromorphic image sensor array features photon-triggered synaptic plasticity owing to its quasi-linear time-dependent photocurrent generation and prolonged photocurrent decay, originated from charge trapping in the MoS2-organic vertical stack. The curved neuromorphic image sensor array integrated with a plano-convex lens derives a pre-processed image from a set of noisy optical inputs without redundant data storage, processing, and communications as well as without complex optics. The proposed imaging device can substantially improve efficiency of the image acquisition and recognition process, a step forward to the next generation machine vision., Designing efficient bio-inspired visual recognition system remains a challenge. Here the authors present a curved neuromorphic image sensor array based on a heterostructure of MoS2 and pV3D3 integrated with a plano-convex lens for efficient image acquisition and data pre-processing.

Conventional wide-field-of-view cameras consist of multi-lens optics and flat image sensor arrays, which makes them bulky and heavy. As a result, they are poorly suited to advanced mobile applications such as drones and autonomous vehicles. In nature, the eyes of aquatic animals consist of a single spherical lens and a highly sensitive hemispherical retina, an approach that could be beneficial in the development of synthetic wide-field-of-view imaging systems. Here, we report an aquatic-vision-inspired camera that consists of a single monocentric lens and a hemispherical silicon nanorod photodiode array. The imaging system features a wide field of view, miniaturized design, low optical aberration, deep depth of field and simple visual accommodation. Furthermore, under vignetting, the photodiode array enables high-quality panoramic imaging due to the enhanced photodetection properties of the silicon nanorod photodiodes. By integrating a single monocentric lens with a hemispherical silicon nanorod photodiode array, a wide-field-of-view camera is created that offers low optical aberration, deep depth of field and simple visual accommodation.

We herein developed an iontophoretic transdermal drug delivery system for the effective delivery of electrically mobile drug nanocarriers (DNs). Our system consists of a portable and disposable reverse electrodialysis (RED) battery that generates electric power for iontophoresis through the ionic exchange. In addition, in order to provide a drug reservoir to the RED-driven iontophoretic system, an electroconductive hydrogel composed of polypyrrole-incorporated poly(vinyl alcohol) (PYP) was used. The PYP hydrogel facilitated electron transfer from the RED battery and accelerated the mobility of electrically mobile DNs released from the PYP hydrogel. In this study, we showed that fluconazole- or rosiglitazone-loaded DNs could be functionalized with charge-inducing agents, and DNs with charge modification resulted in facilitated transdermal transport via repulsive RED-driven iontophoresis. In addition, topical application and RED-driven iontophoresis of rosiglitazone-loaded DNs resulted in an effective antiobese condition displaying decreased bodyweight, reduced glucose level, and increased conversion of white adipose tissues to brown adipose tissues in vivo. Consequently, we highlight that this transdermal drug delivery platform would be extensively utilized for delivering diverse therapeutic agents in a noninvasive way.

Injectable hydrogels show high potential foriin vivo/ibiomedical applications owing to their distinctive mode of administration into the human body. In this study, we propose a material design strategy for developing a multifunctional injectable hydrogel with good adhesiveness, stretchability, and bioresorbability. Its multifunctionality, whereupon multiple reactions occur simultaneously during its injection into the body without requiring energy stimuli and/or additives, was realized through meticulous engineering of bioresorbable precursors based on hydrogel chemistry. The multifunctional injectable hydrogel can be administered through a minimally invasive procedure, form a conformal adhesive interface with the target tissue, dynamically stretch along with the organ motions with minimal mechanical constraints, and be resorbediin vivo/iafter a specific period. Further, the incorporation of functional nanomaterials into the hydrogel allows for variousiin vivo/idiagnostic and therapeutic applications, without compromising the original multifunctionality of the hydrogel. These features are verified through theranostic case studies on representative organs, including the skin, liver, heart, and bladder.

Recent advances in nanostructured materials and unconventional device designs have transformed the bioelectronics from a rigid and bulky form into a soft and ultrathin form and brought enormous advantages to the bioelectronics. For example, mechanical deformability of the soft bioelectronics and thus its conformal contact onto soft curved organs such as brain, heart, and skin have allowed researchers to measure high-quality biosignals, deliver real-time feedback treatments, and lower long-term side-effects

Objectives This study aimed to analyze nationwide representative data from the 11th Korean Youth Health Risk Behavior Web-Based Survey to determine whether factors including socio-demographics, smoking and alcohol consumption, were factors related to high school students that had experienced sexual intercourse. Methods A total of 33,744 students (17,346 boys and 16,398 girls) in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grade at high school were analyzed. SPSS complex samples methods were used for analyses. Socio-demographic and health risk behaviors (type of region of residence, family structure, and economic status, student academic achievement, gender, high school grade, pocket money, student smoking, alcohol consumption, and having engaged in sexual intercourse) were considered as independent variables. Results There were 3.6% of girls and 9.9% of boys in high school that were sexually active. This behavior and the average number of cigarettes smoked daily, and alcohol consumed weekly, represented a dose-response relationship, after considering confounding factors. Compared with students that did not smoke or consume alcohol, smoking 1-9 cigarettes per day and consuming 1-6 cups of alcohol and group "smoking more than 10 cigarettes per day and consuming more than 7 cups of alcohol, had a 5.94 and 22.25 higher risk of having had sexual intercourse, respectively. Conclusion Cigarette smoking and alcohol consumption were associated with an increased likelihood of high school students engaging in sexual intercourse.

Objectives This research aimed to understand the popularity of topics in the field of women's health through analysis of online news articles which were chronologically classified and examined to determine how women's health and diseases had changed over time. Methods Women's health and disease news articles were collated from a popular news website between 1993 to 2015 and preprocessed using gynecological medical terminology, Korean words and nouns (excluding general nouns not related to women's healthcare topics). The resultant articles (N = 7,710) were analyzed using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation algorithm and major topics were extracted. Topic trends were analyzed by year and period for women's health. Results It was observed that most of the women's health articles were focused on "Healthcare", and 9 other topics were identified that represented a relatively small proportion in 1993-2000. In 2001-2005, most of the articles were focused on "Medical Services" and "Dietary Supplements" with some specific topics that peaked people's interest, as compared to those focused on "Healthcare" in the 1990s. It was also observed that differences in the proportion of each topic was small after 2011. Conclusion Changes in topics related to women's disease were not clearly distinguished in the 1990s but this changed from 2001where articles related to "women disease" appeared as articles on the topics of various diseases.

Drug-induced cardiotoxicity is a major problem in drug discovery. Many approaches to efficient drug screening have been developed, including animal testing in vivo and cell testing in vitro. However, due to intrinsic difference between species, animal-based toxicity testing cannot comprehensively determine the potential side effects in subsequent human clinical trials. Furthermore, conventional in vitro assays are costly and labour-intensive, and require numerous tests. Therefore, it would be necessary to develop heart-on-a-chips made with advanced materials and soft bioelectronic fabrication techniques that offer fast, efficient, and accurate sensing of cardiac cells' behaviors in vitro. In this review, we introduce two key sensing methods in heart-on-a-chip for physical and electrical measurements. First, optical (e.g., direct and calcium imaging, and fluorescent, laser-based, and colorimetric sensing) and electrical (e.g., impedance, strain, and crack sensing) sensors that record the contractility of cardiomyocytes are reviewed. Subsequently, various sensors composed of rigid planar/three-dimensional electrodes, soft/flexible electronics, and nanomaterial-based transistors to monitor extracellular and intracellular electrophysiological potentials are discussed. A brief overview of future technology and comments on the current challenges conclude the review.

Implantable electronic devices for recording electrophysiological signals and for stimulating muscles and nerves have been widely used throughout clinical medicine. Mechanical mismatch between conventional rigid biomedical devices and soft curvilinear tissues, however, has frequently resulted in a low signal to noise ratio and/or mechanical fatigue and scarring. Multifunctionality ranging from various sensing modalities to therapeutic functions is another important goal for implantable biomedical devices. Here, a stretchable and transparent medical device using a cell-sheet–graphene hybrid is reported, which can be implanted to form a high quality biotic/abiotic interface. The hybrid is composed of a sheet of C2C12 myoblasts on buckled, mesh-patterned graphene electrodes. The graphene electrodes monitor and actuate the C2C12 myoblasts in vitro, serving as a smart cell culture substrate that controls their aligned proliferation and differentiation. This stretchable and transparent cell-sheet–graphene hybrid can be transplanted onto the target muscle tissue, to record electromyographical signals, and stimulate implanted sites electrically and/or optically in vivo. Additional cellular therapeutic effect of the cell-sheet–graphene hybrid is obtained by integrated myobalst cell sheets. Any immune responses within implanted muscle tissues are not observed. This multifunctional device provides many new opportunities in the emerging field of soft bioelectronics.

The production of rechargeable batteries is rapidly expanding, and there are going to be new challenges in the near future about how the potential environmental impact caused by the disposal of the large volume of the used batteries can be minimized. Herein, a novel strategy is proposed to address these concerns by applying biodegradable device technology. An eco-friendly and biodegradable sodium-ion secondary battery (SIB) is developed through extensive material screening followed by the synthesis of biodegradable electrodes and their seamless assembly with an unconventional biodegradable separator, electrolyte, and package. Each battery component decomposes in nature into non-toxic compounds or elements via hydrolysis and/or fungal degradation, with all of the biodegradation products naturally abundant and eco-friendly. Detailed biodegradation mechanisms and toxicity influence of each component on living organisms are determined. In addition, this new SIB delivers performance comparable to that of conventional non-degradable SIBs. The strategy and findings suggest a novel eco-friendly biodegradable paradigm for large-scale rechargeable battery systems.

Soft bioelectronics intended for application to wearable and implantable biomedical devices have attracted great attention from material scientists, device engineers, and clinicians because of their extremely soft mechanical properties that match with a variety of human organs and tissues, including the brain, heart, skin, eye, muscles, and neurons, as well as their wide diversity in device designs and biomedical functions that can be finely tuned for each specific case of applications. These unique features of the soft bioelectronics have allowed minimal mechanical and biological damage to organs and tissues integrated with bioelectronic devices and reduced side effects including inflammation, skin irritation, and immune responses even after long-term biointegration. These favorable properties for biointegration have enabled long-term monitoring of key biomedical indicators with high signal-to-noise ratio, reliable diagnosis of the patient's health status, and in situ feedback therapy with high treatment efficacy optimized for the requirements of each specific disease model. These advantageous device functions and performances could be maximized by adopting novel high-quality soft nanomaterials, particularly ultrathin two-dimensional (2D) materials, for soft bioelectronics. Two-dimensional materials are emerging material candidates for the channels and electrodes in electronic devices (semiconductors and conductors, respectively). They can also be applied to various biosensors and therapeutic actuators in soft bioelectronics. The ultrathin vertically layered nanostructure, whose layer number can be controlled in the synthesis step, and the horizontally continuous planar molecular structure, which can be found over a large area, have conferred unique mechanical, electrical, and optical properties upon the 2D materials. The atomically thin nanostructure allows mechanical softness and flexibility and high optical transparency of the device, while the large-area continuous thin film structure allows efficient carrier transport within the 2D plane. In addition, the quantum confinement effect in the atomically thin 2D layers introduces interesting optoelectronic properties and superb photodetecting capabilities. When fabricated as soft bioelectronic devices, these interesting and useful material features of the 2D materials enable unconventional device functions in biological and optical sensing, as well as superb performance in electrical and biochemical therapeutic actuations. In this Account, we first summarize the distinctive characteristics of the 2D materials in terms of the mechanical, optical, chemical, electrical, and biomedical aspects and then present application examples of the 2D materials to soft bioelectronic devices based on each aforementioned unique material properties. Among various kinds of 2D materials, we particularly focus on graphene and MoS

Graphene has been highlighted as a platform material in transparent electronics and optoelectronics, including flexible and stretchable ones, due to its unique properties such as optical transparency, mechanical softness, ultrathin thickness, and high carrier mobility. Despite huge research efforts for graphene-based electronic/optoelectronic devices, there are remaining challenges in terms of their seamless integration, such as the high-quality contact formation, precise alignment of micrometer-scale patterns, and control of interfacial-adhesion/local-resistance. Here, a thermally controlled transfer printing technique that allows multiple patterned-graphene transfers at desired locations is presented. Using the thermal-expansion mismatch between the viscoelastic sacrificial layer and the elastic stamp, a “heating and cooling” process precisely positions patterned graphene layers on various substrates, including graphene prepatterns, hydrophilic surfaces, and superhydrophobic surfaces, with high transfer yields. A detailed theoretical analysis of underlying physics/mechanics of this approach is also described. The proposed transfer printing successfully integrates graphene-based stretchable sensors, actuators, light-emitting diodes, and other electronics in one platform, paving the way toward transparent and wearable multifunctional electronic systems.

Objectives : This study was conducted to verify the influence organizational health has on customer orientation by hospital ownership. Methods : This survey was conducted on a public hospital, private hospital, and religious hospital, respectively, during March 2014 and a total of 210 questionnaires were used in the analysis. ANOVA and regression analysis were used to analyze the collected data. Results : The management environment factor of organizational health was statistically significant in the public hospital compared to the private hospital. The reliability factor of customer organization was statistically significant in the public hospital and religious hospital respectively compared to the private hospital. For reactivity, the religious hospital was statistically significant compared to private hospital. A positive influence was shown in the vitality factor at the public hospital, and community orientation at the private hospital, while both community orientation and career showed effects at the religious hospital. ICU had a negative influence on customer orientation at the private hospital. Conclusions : The reason vitality had a relatively more important effect on customer orientation in the public hospital was due that age group of 20~29 was the dominant socio-demographic factor. Furthermore, the influence of community orientation on customer orientation in the private hospital and religious hospital may be related to the nurses' career.

This study confirmed that the organizational health of nurses have an effect on customer orientation. This survey was conducted March 1 to 31, 2014 and a total of 210 questionnaires were used in the analysis. Descriptive statistics, t-test, ANOVA, factor analysis, and regression analysis were used to analyze the collected data in the SPSS software package. The findings are summarized as follows: First, the business environment and community-oriented organizations on health factors had an influence on customer orientation(p

MicroRNAs are differentially expressed in breast cancer cells and have been implicated in cancer formation, tumour invasion and metastasis. We investigated the miRNA expression profiles in the developing mammary gland. MiR-137 was expressed prominently in the developing mammary gland. When the miR-137 was over-expressed in the embryo, the mammary epithelium became thickened. Moreover, genes associated with mammary gland formation such as Tbx3 and Lef1 were not expressed. This suggests that miR-137 induces gland formation and invasion. When miR-137 was over-expressed in MDA-MB-231 cells, their ability to form tumours in adult mice was significantly reduced. These data support miR-137 decides epithelial cell behavior in the human breast cancer. It also suggests that miR-137 is a potential therapeutic target for amelioration of breast cancer progression.