Prolonged exposure to NO2 can cause lung tissue inflammation, bronchiolitis fibrosa obliterans, and silo filler’s disease. In recent years, nanostructured semiconducting metal oxides have been widely used to fabricate gas sensors because of their unique structure and surface-to-volume ratio compared to layered materials. In particular, the different morphologies of ZnO-based nanostructures significantly affect the detection property of NO2 gas sensors. However, because of the large interaction energy of chemisorption (1–10 eV), metal oxide-based gas sensors are typically operated above 100 °C, overcoming the energy limits to attain high sensitivity and fast reaction. High operating temperature negatively affects the reliability and durability of semiconductor-based sensors; at high temperature, the diffusion and sintering effects at the metal oxide grain boundaries are major factors causing undesirable long-term drift problems and preventing stability improvements. Therefore, we demonstrate NO2 gas sensors consisting of ZnO hemitubes (HTs) and nanotubes (NTs) covered with TiO2 nanoparticles (NPs). To operate the gas sensor at room temperature (RT), we measured the gas-sensing properties with ultraviolet illumination onto the active region of the gas sensor for photoactivation instead of conventional thermal activation by heating. The performance of these gas sensors was enhanced by the change of barrier potential at the ZnO/TiO2 interfaces, and their depletion layer was expanded by the NPs formation. The gas sensor based on ZnO HTs showed 1.2 times higher detection property than those consisting of ZnO NTs at the 25 ppm NO2 gas.
Recent advancements in telecommunications and the tactile Internet have paved the way for studying human senses through haptic technology. Haptic technology enables tactile sensations and control using virtual reality (VR) over a network. Researchers are developing various haptic devices to allow for real-time tactile sensation, which can be used in various industries, telesurgery, and other mission-critical operations. One of the main criteria of such devices is extremely low latency, as low as 1 ms. Although researchers are attempting to develop haptic devices with low latency, there remains a need to improve latency and robustness to hand sizes. In this paper, a low-latency haptic open glove (LLHOG) based on a rotary position sensor and min-max scaling (MMS) filter is proposed to realize immersive VR interaction. The proposed device detects finger flexion/extension and adduction/abduction motions using two position sensors located in the metacarpophalangeal (MCP) joint. The sensor data are processed using an MMS filter to enable low latency and ensure high accuracy. Moreover, the MMS filter is used to process object handling control data to enable hand motion-tracking. Its performance is evaluated in terms of accuracy, latency, and robustness to finger length variations. We achieved a very low processing delay of 145.37 μs per finger and overall hand motion-tracking latency of 4 ms. Moreover, we tested the proposed glove with 10 subjects and achieved an average mean absolute error (MAE) of for flexion/extension, and for adduction/abduction. The proposed method is therefore superior to the existing methods in terms of the above factors for immersive VR interaction.
9 September 2023 in Journal of Materials Research and Technology