As the largest organ in the human body, the skin provides the important sensory channel for humans to receive external stimulations based on touch. By the information perceived through touch, people can feel and guess the properties of objects, like weight, temperature, textures, and motion, etc. In fact, those properties are nerve stimuli to our brain received by different kinds of receptors in the skin. Mechanical, electrical, and thermal stimuli can stimulate these receptors and cause different information to be conveyed through the nerves. Technologies for actuators to provide mechanical, electrical or thermal stimuli have been developed. These include static or vibrational actuation, electrostatic stimulation, focused ultrasound, and more. Smart materials, such as piezoelectric materials, carbon nanotubes, and shape memory alloys, play important roles in providing actuation for tactile sensation. This paper aims to review the background biological knowledge of human tactile sensing, to give an understanding of how we sense and interact with the world through the sense of touch, as well as the conventional and state-of-the-art technologies of tactile actuators for tactile feedback delivery.

This work presents a hybrid tissue-anchoring mechanism that combines a pre-compressed microspring for autonomous actuation and a barbed microneedle (MN) for robust tissue anchoring with minimized preloading. The spring-microneedle unit (SMU) allows facile integration with potential ingestible resident systems to enable prolonged operation in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract (e.g. biomarker monitoring and therapeutic drug delivery). Utilizing high-precision direct laser writing (DLW), the SMU is directly fabricated on a flexible polyimide substrate, which that can be conveniently attached onto the exterior packages of ingestible devices to reduce the form factor and therefore to save room for multifunctional system components. The 3-D printed microspring can be compressed and embedded within a thin layer of dissolvable polymer (polyethylene glycol) and autonomously actuated with a ~140-μm displacement upon polymer dissolution in aqueous media at 37°C. Mechanical calibration of the SMU demonstrated an average release force of 8 mN for a 100-μm actuation. According to our previous research into barbed MNs, this actuation force provides a large enough preload for a MN to achieve robust tissue-anchoring. Above all, the novel and effective tissue-anchoring mechanism has a great potential for enabling long-term operation of miniature biosensing and drug delivery systems. [2020-0169]

Modular microfluidics offer the opportunity to combine the precise fluid control, rapid sample processing, low sample and reagent volumes, and relatively lower cost of conventional microfluidics with the flexible reconfigurability needed to accommodate the requirements of target applications such as drug toxicity studies. However, combining the capabilities of fully adaptable modular microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) assembly with the simplicity of conventional microfluidic fabrication remains a challenge. A hybrid polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS)-molding/photolithographic process is demonstrated to rapidly fabricate LEGO^®-like modular blocks. The blocks are created with different sizes that interlock via tongue-and-groove joints in the plane and stack via interference fits out of the plane. These miniature strong but reversible connections have a measured resistance to in-plane and out-of-plane forces of up to >6000× and >1000× the weight of the block itself, respectively. The LEGO^®-like interference fits enable O-ring-free microfluidic connections that withstand internal fluid pressures of >120 kPa. A single layer of blocks is assembled into LEGO^®-like cell culture plates, where the in vitro biocompatibility and drug toxicity to lung epithelial adenocarcinoma cells and hepatocellular carcinoma cells cultured in the modular microwells are measured. A double-layer block structure is then assembled so that a microchannel formed at the interface between layers connects two microwells. Breast tumor cells and hepatocytes cultured in the coupled wells demonstrate interwell migration as well as the simultaneous effects of a single drug on the two cell types.

Small-scale, out-of-plane actuators can enable tactile interfaces; however, achieving sufficient actuator force and displacement can require larger actuators. In this work, 2-mm² out-of-plane microactuators were created, and were demonstrated to output up to 6.3 µm of displacement and 16 mN of blocking force at 170 V. The actuators converted in-plane force and displacement from a piezoelectric extensional actuator into out-of-plane force and displacement using robust, microelectromechanical systems (MEMS)-enabled, half-scissor amplifiers. The microscissors employed two layers of lithographically patterned SU-8 epoxy microstructures, laminated with a thin film of structural polyimide and adhesive to form compact flexural hinges that enabled the actuators’ small area. The self-aligned manufacture minimized assembly error and fabrication complexity. The scissor design dominated the actuators’ performance, and the effects of varying scissor angle, flexure thickness, and adhesive type were characterized to optimize the actuators’ output. Reducing the microscissor angle yielded the highest actuator performance, as it maximized the amplification of the half-scissor’s displacement and minimized scissor deformation under externally applied loads. The actuators’ simultaneously large displacements and blocking forces for their size were quantified by a high displacement-blocking force product per unit area of up to 50 mN·µm/mm². For a linear force–displacement relationship, this corresponds to a work done per unit area of 25 mN·µm/mm².

This work presents a miniaturized electrochemical sensor-integrated bioprocess monitoring pod (bPod) that wirelessly monitors local dissolved oxygen (DO) saturation within bioreactors in real-time. The system comprises a compact printed circuit board (PCB) that integrates a potentiostat analog-front-end (AFE) and a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) microcontroller with an electrochemical DO sensor. In situ detection of DO within the bioreactor is enabled via a 3-D printed ABS-M30i shell, representing a robust and biocompatible packaging solution for prolonged monitoring. The platform is evaluated in a bench-scale bioreactor filled with aqueous media, and data is extracted wirelessly via a custom-developed application. A linear response corresponding to DO saturation levels was achieved using chronoamperometry (CA), exhibiting a dynamic voltage range between 1.3 V (-4.9 μA) and 0.87 V (-11.1 μA), corresponding to 0% and 100% DO saturation respectively, with a sensitivity of 6.3 mV/DO%. This work highlights a unique sensor assembly and packaging approach to overcome challenges for localized bioprocess monitoring platforms in bioreactors. [2020-0149]