In this work, a low-cost, off-the-shelf load cell is installed on a typical hospital bed and implemented to measure the longitudinal ballistocardiogram (BCG) in order to evaluate its utility for successful contactless monitoring of heart and respiration rates. The major focus is placed on the beat-to-beat heart rate monitoring task, for which an unsupervised machine learning algorithm is employed, while its performance is compared to an electrocardiogram (ECG) signal that serves as a reference. The algorithm is a modified version of a previously published one, which had successfully detected 49.2% of recorded heartbeats. However, the presented system was tested with seven volunteers and four different lying positions, and obtained an improved overall detection rate of 83.9%.

This manuscript describes the design considerations, implementation, and laboratory validation of an odor sensing module whose purpose is to support people that suffer from incontinence. Because of the requirements expressed by the affected end-users the odor sensing unit is realized as a portable accessory that may be connected to any pre-existing smart device. We have opted for a low-cost, low-power consuming metal oxide based gas detection approach to highlight the viability of developing an inexpensive yet helpful odor recognition technology. The system consists of a hotplate employing, inkjet-printed p-type semiconducting layers of copper(II) oxide, and chromium titanium oxide. Both functional layers are characterized with respect to their gas-sensitive behavior towards humidity, ammonia, methylmercaptan, and dimethylsulfide and we demonstrate detection limits in the parts-per-billion range for the two latter gases. Employing a temperature variation scheme that reads out the layer’s resistivity in a steady-state, we use each sensor chip as a virtual array. With this setup, we demonstrate the feasibility of detecting odors associated with incontinence.

The influence of bath hydrodynamics on the resultant micromechanical properties of electrodeposited nickel-cobalt alloy system is investigated. The bath hydrodynamics realized by magnetic stirring is simulated using COMSOL Multiphysics and a region of minimum variation in velocity within the electrolytic cell is determined and validated experimentally. Nickel-cobalt alloy and nickel coating samples are deposited galvanostatically (50 mA/cm²) with varying bath velocity (0 to 42 cm/s). The surface morphology of samples gradually changed from granular (fractal dimension 2.97) to more planar (fractal dimension 2.15) growth type, and the according average roughness decreased from 207.5 nm to 11 nm on increasing the electrolyte velocity from 0 to 42 cm/s for nickel-cobalt alloys; a similar trend was also found in the case of nickel coatings. The calculated grain size from the X-ray diffractograms decreased from 31 nm to 12 nm and from 69 nm to 26 nm as function of increasing velocity (up to 42 cm/s) for nickel-cobalt and nickel coatings, respectively. Consecutively, the measured Vickers microhardness values increased by 76% (i.e., from 393 HV0.01 to 692 HV0.01) and by 49% (i.e., from 255 HV0.01 to 381 HV0.01) for nickel-cobalt and nickel coatings, respectively, which fits well with the Hall–Petch relation.

Having benefited from technological developments, such as surface micromachining, high-aspect-ratio silicon micromachining and ongoing miniaturization in complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) technology, some electrostatic actuators became widely used in large-volume products today. However, due to reliability-related issues and inherent limitations, such as the pull-in instability and extremely small stroke and force, commercial electrostatic actuators are limited to basic implementations and the micro range, and thus cannot be employed in more intricate systems or scaled up to the macro range (mm stroke and N force). To overcome these limitations, cooperative electrostatic actuator systems have been researched by many groups in recent years. After defining the scope and three different levels of cooperation, this review provides an overview of examples of weak, medium and advanced cooperative architectures. As a specific class, hybrid cooperative architectures are presented, in which besides electrostatic actuation, another actuation principle is used. Inchworm motors—belonging to the advanced cooperative architectures—can provide, in principle, the link from the micro to the macro range. As a result of this outstanding potential, they are reviewed and analyzed here in more detail. However, despite promising research concepts and results, commercial applications are still missing. The acceptance of piezoelectric materials in some industrial CMOS facilities might now open the gate towards hybrid cooperative microactuators realized in high volumes in CMOS technology.

This paper reports a novel method to study and control explosions of explosive porous silicon (porous silicon impregnated with an oxidizer). This is achieved by transferring an explosion from one site to another by adjusting size and distance between locally defined areas of porous silicon. Using standard microtechnology, porous silicon can be locally generated on a silicon wafer surface in such a way that the amount of exploding porous silicon is controlled by the layout. Such an approach allows a domino-like sequence of explosions on a single chip using only one manual ignition. Confinement and sequential explosions were studied for different dimensions of porous silicon areas with different shapes (circle, rectangle, and square) and separation distances between them. A critical separation distance between porous silicon sites is found in which sequential explosions have achieved. [2017-0260]