Bioelectrical or electrophysiological signals generated by living cells or tissues during daily physiological activities are closely related to the state of the body and organ functions, and ...therefore are widely used in clinical diagnosis, health monitoring, intelligent control and human-computer interaction. Ag/AgCl electrodes with wet conductive gels are widely used to pick up these bioelectrical signals using electrodes and record them in the form of electroencephalograms, electrocardiograms, electromyography, electrooculograms, etc. However, the inconvenience, instability and infection problems resulting from the use of gel with Ag/AgCl wet electrodes can't meet the needs of long-term signal acquisition, especially in wearable applications. Hence, focus has shifted toward the study of dry electrodes that can work without gels or adhesives. In this paper, a retrospective overview of the development of dry electrodes used for monitoring bioelectrical signals is provided, including the sensing principles, material selection, device preparation, and measurement performance. In addition, the challenges regarding the limitations of materials, fabrication technologies and wearable performance of dry electrodes are discussed. Finally, the development obstacles and application advantages of different dry electrodes are analyzed to make a comparison and reveal research directions for future studies.
This paper mainly introduces the research progress of MEMS electromagnetic vibration energy harvester, hoping to provide valuable guidance and reference for researchers in related fields. In this ...paper, recent studies are divided into three groups according to their objectives and approaches: reducing the resonant frequency of the harvester to collect low frequency vibration energy from the environment; broadening the bandwidth of the harvester to increase the utilization of the random vibration energy; and developing new process compatible with MEMS for mass production. Besides, maintaining valuable output performances, such as power and power density, is also an important concern in these studies. Limited to the current technology, it is impossible to make a perfect harvester with low resonant frequency, wide frequency band, good compatibility with MEMS, and good output performances at the same time. However, we can focus on one or two characteristics according to the application, to which this paper provides valuable reference. More works on simulation, new process, and detailed design of the components are required in MEMS electromagnetic vibration energy harvesters.
Sensitive detection of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) is significant for environmental monitoring and medical applications. In this work, multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) and polyethylene ...glycol (PEG) that have good adsorption for VOCs, were sprayed layer by layer on an interdigitated electrode (IDE) to build a sensitive VOCs gas sensor. The relative resistance change (△R/R) when the sensor was exposed to VOCs was measured. The sensor showed high sensitivity to acetone, ethanol, isopropanol and isoprene with fast response (110 ± 5 s) and recovery (152 ± 5 s) at room temperature, and the lower detection limit (LDL) of the sensor reached 9 ppm. With the micro-fabricated IDE structure, the sensor can be easily built into an electric nose for VOC recognition and measurement.
Real‐time and continuous monitoring of physiological signals is essential for mobile health, which is becoming a popular tool for efficient and convenient medical services. Here, an active pulse ...sensing system that can detect the weak vibration patterns of the human radial artery is constructed with a sandwich‐structure piezoelectret that has high equivalent piezoelectricity. The high precision and stability of the system result in possible medical assessment applications, including the capability to identify common heart problems (such as arrhythmia); the feasibility to conduct pulse palpation measurements similar to well‐trained doctors in Traditional Chinese Medicine; and the possibility to measure and read blood pressure.
A piezoelectret‐based human pulse sensing system with excellent sensitivity and stability is applied for medical assessments. Pulse waves classification, arrhythmia diagnosis, blood pressure measurement, and imitation of three‐finger pulse palpation in Traditional Chinese Medicine are successfully demonstrated, indicating the potential application in wearable mobile health.
Underwater acoustic technology as an important means of exploring the oceans is receiving more attention. Denoising for underwater acoustic information in complex marine environments has become a hot ...research topic. In order to realize the hydrophone signal denoising, this paper proposes a joint denoising method based on improved symplectic geometry modal decomposition (ISGMD) and wavelet threshold (WT). Firstly, the energy contribution (EC) is introduced into the SGMD as an iterative termination condition, which efficiently improves the denoising capability of SGMD and generates a reasonable number of symplectic geometry components (SGCs). Then spectral clustering (SC) is used to accurately aggregate SGCs into information clusters mixed-clusters, and noise clusters. Spectrum entropy (SE) is used to distinguish clusters quickly. Finally, the mixed clusters achieve the signal denoising by wavelet threshold. The useful information is reconstructed to achieve the original signal denoising. In the simulation experiment, the denoising effect of different denoising algorithms in the time domain and frequency domain is compared, and SNR and RMSE are used as evaluation indexes. The results show that the proposed algorithm has better performance. In the experiment of hydrophone, the denoising ability of the proposed algorithm is also verified.
The long-term monitoring of electrocardiogram (ECG) is critical for the accurate diagnosis and tracking of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). However, the commercial Ag/AgCl electrode is not suitable ...for long-term monitoring due to skin allergies and signal degradation, caused by the conductive gel drying over time. In this paper, a flexible gel-free electrode, composed of a multi-wall carbon nanotube (MWCNT) and polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), is proposed for long-term wearable ECG monitoring. To achieve uniform dispersion of MWCNTs in viscous PDMS, we developed a novel parallel solvent-assisted ultrasonic dispersion method, wherein the organic solvent n⁻Hexane served as a dispersion to avoid MWCNT aggregates. The properties of the MWCNT/PDMS electrode were assessed through structural characterization, contact impedance tests, ECG measurements, and biocompatibility tests. When the MWCNT weight fraction reached 5.5 wt%, the skin-electrode contact impedance of the MWCNT/PDMS electrode was lower than that of the Ag/AgCl electrode below 100 Hz. In daily ECG monitoring, the MWCNT/PDMS electrodes showed superior performance against motion artifact compared to the Ag/AgCl electrode. After seven days of wearing the MWCNT/PDMS electrode, ECG signals did not degrade and no side effects, such as skin redness and swelling, were observed. Thus, this electrode could enable long-term ECG monitoring in wearable healthcare systems.
Chromatic confocal technology (CCT) is one of the most promising methods for the contactless and accurate measurement of structure profiles. Based on the principles of chromatic dispersion and ...confocal theory, a dispersion probe is proposed and optimized with several commercial and cheap refractive index lenses. The probe provides 0.3× magnification and a dispersion range of 400 μm with a commercial LED source with an effective bandwidth of ca. 450-623 nm. Since the noise fluctuation can affect the extraction stability of the focal wavelength, a modification to the centroid peak extraction algorithm is proposed in this paper, where several virtual pixels are interpolated among the real pixels of the spectrometer before thresholding. In addition, a series of experiments were carried out to test the system's displacement measurement performance. The results clearly show that stability is improved by the modified algorithm, and the calibration repeatability is ±0.3 μm in the full measurement range with a linear stage. The standard deviation at the fixed position has an optimal value of 0.009 μm. The section profile of a Fresnel lens is measured by the CCT system to demonstrate its high feasibility and efficiency.
With the development of ocean exploration technology, the exploration of the ocean has become a hot research field involving the use of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). In complex underwater ...environments, the fast, safe, and smooth arrival of target points is key for AUVs to conduct underwater exploration missions. Most path-planning algorithms combine deep reinforcement learning (DRL) and path-planning algorithms to achieve obstacle avoidance and path shortening. In this paper, we propose a method to improve the local minimum in the artificial potential field (APF) to make AUVs out of the local minimum by constructing a traction force. The improved artificial potential field (IAPF) method is combined with DRL for path planning while optimizing the reward function in the DRL algorithm and using the generated path to optimize the future path. By comparing our results with the experimental data of various algorithms, we found that the proposed method has positive effects and advantages in path planning. It is an efficient and safe path-planning method with obvious potential in underwater navigation devices.
This research introduces an idea of producing both nanoscale and microscale pores in piezoelectric material, and combining the properties of the molecular β-phase dipoles in ferroelectric material ...and the space charge dipoles in order to increase the sensitivity of the sensor and modulate the response frequency bandwidth of the material. Based on this idea, a bi-nano-micro porous dual ferro-electret hybrid self-powered flexible heart sound detection sensor is proposed. Acid etching and electrospinning were the fabrication processes used to produce a piezoelectric film with nanoscale and microscale pores, and corona poling was used for air ionization to produce an electret effect. In this paper, the manufacturing process of the sensor is introduced, and the effect of the porous structure and corona poling on improving the performance of the sensor is discussed. The proposed flexible sensor has an equivalent piezoelectric coefficient d
of 3312 pC/N, which is much larger than the piezoelectric coefficient of the common piezoelectric materials. Experiments were carried out to verify the function of the flexible sensor together with the SS17L heart sound sensor (BIOPAC, Goleta, CA, USA) as a reference. The test results demonstrated its practical application for wearable heart sound detection and the potential for heart disease detection. The proposed flexible sensor in this paper could realize batch production, and has the advantages of flexibility, low production cost and a short processing time compared with the existing heart sound detection sensors.
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