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When wearable and implantable devices first arose in the 1970s, they were rigid and clashed dramatically with our soft, pliable skin and organs. The past two decades have witnessed a major upheaval in these devices. Traditional electronics are six orders of magnitude stiffer than soft tissue. As a result, when rigid electronics are integrated with the human body, severe challenges in both mechanical and geometrical form mismatch occur. This mismatch creates an uneven contact at the interface of soft-tissue, leading to noisy and unreliable data gathering of the body’s vital signs. This paper aims to predict the role that discreet, seamless medical devices will play in personalized health care by discussing novel solutions for alleviating this interface mismatch and exploring the challenges in developing and commercializing such devices.

Since the form factors of biology cannot be changed to match those of rigid devices, conformable devices that mimic the shape and mechanical properties of soft body tissue must be designed and fabricated. These conformable devices play the role of imperceptible medical interfaces. Such interfaces can help scientists and medical practitioners to gain further insights into the body by providing an accurate and reliable instrument that can conform closely to the target areas of interest for continuous, long-term monitoring of the human body, while improving user experience.

The authors have highlighted current attempts of mechanically adaptive devices for health care, and the authors forecast key aspects for the future of these conformable biomedical devices and the ways in which these devices will revolutionize how health care is administered or obtained.

The authors conclude this paper with the perspective on the challenges of implementing this technology for practical use, including device packaging, environmental life cycle, data privacy, industry partnership and collaboration.

This study examines acquirers' earnings management in intragroup mergers to investigate whether stock-for-stock mergers between affiliated firms within the same family-controlled business group facilitate the controlling shareholder's rent seeking. Specifically, it investigates the acquiring firm's incentive to inflate premerger-announcement earnings in intragroup mergers given the controlling shareholder's relative equity holdings in the target and acquiring firms. The authors also examine how creditor monitoring affects premerger-announcement earnings in intragroup mergers compared to mergers between independent firms.

Using univariate analysis, panel regression based on accruals and cross-sectional regression based on discretionary accruals, the authors compare earnings management in mergers between affiliated firms with that in mergers between independent firms in the context of Korean business groups. The authors also compare the effects of creditors on earnings management in both cases.

Acquirers' premerger-announcement positive abnormal accruals are less evident in mergers between affiliated firms than in mergers between independent firms. These accruals decrease with high financial leverage only in the latter case, suggesting that creditor monitoring mitigates earnings management only in independent firm mergers.

The authors examine intragroup mergers, unlike previous studies, which focus on unaffiliated firm mergers. They also contribute to the literature on stock-for-stock mergers, showing that lender monitoring can mitigate the acquiring firm's premerger earnings management in unaffiliated firm mergers but not in intragroup mergers. These findings suggest that stock-for-stock mergers between affiliated firms may facilitate the controlling shareholders' rent seeking, which has policy implications for emerging markets with large family-controlled business groups.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a method for defining and categorizing upper lateral somatotypes for clothing size systems used for clothing pattern creation based on directional angles of 3D space vectors.

3D data for 317 men in their twenties obtained from the fifth Size Korea survey were used in this study. Standard landmarks and surfaces were set on the 3D shapes, and six space vector angles of the lateral form were defined and measured. Relationships among the measurement results were clarified, and the results were compared with those obtained using existing classifying methods.

The measurement of the defined directional angles indicated that the swayback type and bend-forward type had the two extreme values, and the straight type was between the two values. The analysis of the correlation between six directional angles indicated that some points in the lower area of the upper body had a high correlation with other points in the lower area.

The subjects of this study were limited to lateral somatotypes, and there is a need for future studies that focus on frontal somatotypes. This research is confined to the upper lateral somatotypes of men in their twenties. Further study is needed to extend the results of this study to other body types such as those of elderly and overweight persons.

Major angle measurements quantified by the somatotypes can be specifically reflect in developing and revised to the right patterns which is spread body shell replica or individual pattern for MTM.

This objective somatotype analysis method can be involved in determining individual body somatotype of ordermade clothes or can provided the accurate information interactively to MTM automatic customized pattern making system.

Accurate measurements of size, shape, and posture were applied and characterized to realize the process. Accuracy was improved compared to existing 2D analysis methods through three-dimensional analysis using directional space vector angles based on 3D forms.

From 1953 to 1961, the South Korean economy grew slowly; the average per capita GNP growth was a mere percent, amounting to less than $100 in 1961. Few people, therefore, look for the sources of later dynamism in this period. As Kyung Cho Chung (1956:225) wrote in the mid‐1950s: “[South Korea] faces grave economic difficulties. The limitations imposed by the Japanese have been succeeded by the division of the country, the general destruction incurred by the Korean War, and the attendant dislocation of the population, which has further disorganized the economy” (see also McCune 1956:191–192). T.R. Fehrenbach (1963:37), in his widely read book on the Korean War, prognosticated: “By themselves, the two halves [of Korea] might possibly build a viable economy by the year 2000, certainly not sooner.”

This research aims to investigate the role of brand types (value brand vs premium brand) in determining review content. Specifically, this research focuses on attribute-based reviews for an innovative product and suggests that consumers of value brands tend to discuss more attributes in their product reviews than those of premium brands. Also, this research suggests that review valence and time have moderating effects on the relationship between brand types and the number of attributes discussed in a review.

This research employed a data set of online consumer reviews (N = 106,980) for wireless earbuds from Amazon.com. It extracted products' attributes from review text using Bigram analysis and measured the number of attributes discussed in a review. It then analyzed the effect of brand types (value brand vs premium brand) on the number of attributes and the moderating effect of review valence and time.

The estimation results of Poisson models reveal that reviews for value brands tend to contain more product attributes than reviews for premium brands. Interestingly, the tendency is stronger among positive (vs negative) reviews, and it decreases over time as more reviews are accumulated.

While existing studies focused on the outcomes of the review content, there was not enough investigation into the determinants of the review content. This study focuses on the number of attributes discussed in a review, a key content characteristic, and provides the first empirical evidence that review content differs by brand types of an innovative product.

This chapter presents an empirical effort for the theoretical applicability of sport diplomacy to sport for development (SFD) research by examining how sport played a role in pursuing South Korea's development at given four historical stages: (1) A prelude to Korean SFD before 1945, (2) sport for a new Korea between 1945 and 1960, (3) sport for developmental state between 1961 and 1979, and (4) sport for coming-out parties of the 1980s. This chapter supports current scholarly attempts to situate the 21st century sport for development (SFD) within the history of sport for social good, as well as approaches integrating the role of sport in the 19th century colonization and/or in the modern version of development during the post-war era. By adding an Asian case (South Korea), this chapter contributes to existing SFD literature mostly focusing on Western countries and their former colonies in Africa and South/Central America. It also contributes to the understanding of soft power's dualistic characteristics that direct domestic and international audiences with a new insight into the sport-development nexus in the history of South Korea.

Because the food service industry is more dependent on customer contact and human resources than other industries, it is crucial to understand the factors influencing employee job satisfaction to ensure that employees provide satisfactory service to customers. However, few studies have incorporated employee reviews of job portals into their research. Many job seekers tend to trust company reviews posted by employees on job portals based on the information provided by the company itself. Thus, this study utilized company reviews and job satisfaction ratings from employees in the food service industry on a job portal site, Job Planet, to conduct mixed-method research.

For qualitative research, we applied the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model to food service industry company reviews to identify 10 job satisfaction factors considered important by employees. For quantitative research, four algorithms were used to predict job satisfaction ratings: regression tree, multilayer perceptron (MLP), random forest and XGBoost. Thus, we generated predictor variables for six cases using the probability values of topics and job satisfaction ratings on a five-point scale through LDA and used them to build prediction algorithms.

The analysis showed that algorithm accuracy performed differently in each of the six cases, and overall, factors such as work-life balance and work environment have a significant impact on predicting job satisfaction ratings.

This study is significant because its methodology and results suggest a new approach based on data analysis in the field of human resources, which can contribute to the operation and planning of corporate human resources management in the future.

This study aims to investigate the effects of a prospective traveler’s perception of media exposure on their intention to visit a destination (i.e. South Korea). Cultural exposure to a particular country through media affects people’s preference for that foreign country, and may ultimately be a function of the behavior for consuming that country’s cultural products – e.g. traveling to that country. Media exposure has been recognized as a major underlying reason for the desire to visit a destination.

This study examines the impacts of potential travelers’ media exposure in three different language-use groups (i.e. English, Japanese and Chinese) and their perception of the media exposure on their intention to visit the actual site (i.e. South Korea). To enhance the understanding of the intention to visit the destination, this study proposes a research model based on use and gratification theory and the belief–desire–intention model.

Mass and social media exposure had an effect on the intention to visit a destination as a result of the gratification and desire experienced through the content.

This study suggests the synthesis of the use and gratification theory and the belief–desire–intention model and an examination of theoretical and practical implications.

This study involved a sample of users of destination marketing sites. In addition, this study investigated the users’ intentions to visit a real tourism destination taking into consideration mass media (traditional media) and social media (new media) based on the use of gratification theory and the belief–desire–intention model. Practically, the findings highlight the crucial role of social media in the intention to visit the tourism destination.