Surface acoustic wave (SAW)-based microfluidics has emerged as a promising technology for precisely manipulating particles and cells at the micro- and nanoscales. Acoustofluidic devices offer advantages such as low energy consumption, high throughput, and label-free operation, making them suitable for particle manipulation tasks including pumping, mixing, sorting, and separation. In this review, we provide an overview and discussion of recent advancements in SAW-based microfluidic devices for micro- and nanoparticle manipulation. Through a thorough investigation of the literature, we explore interdigitated transducer designs, materials, fabrication techniques, microfluidic channel properties, and SAW operational modes of acoustofluidic devices. SAW-based actuators are mainly based on lithium niobate piezoelectric transducers, with a plethora of wavelengths, microfluidic dimensions, and transducer configurations, applied for different fluid manipulation methods: mixing, sorting, and separation. We observed the accuracy of particle sorting across different size ranges and discussed different alternative device configurations to enhance sensitivity. Additionally, the collected data show the successful implementation of SAW devices in real-world applications in medical diagnostics and environmental monitoring. By critically analyzing different approaches, we identified common trends, challenges, and potential areas for improvement in SAW-based microfluidics. Furthermore, we discuss the current state-of-the-art and opportunities for further research and development in this field.

Diabetes mellitus is a prevalent chronic autoimmune disease with a high impact on global health, affecting millions of adults and resulting in significant morbidity and mortality. Achieving optimal blood glucose levels is crucial for diabetes management to prevent acute and long-term complications. Carbohydrate counting (CC) is widely used by patients with type 1 diabetes to adjust prandial insulin bolus doses based on estimated carbohydrate content, contributing to better glycemic control and improved quality of life. However, accurately estimating the carbohydrate content of meals remains challenging for patients, leading to errors in bolus insulin dosing. This review explores the current limitations and challenges in CC accuracy and emphasizes the importance of personalized educational programs to enhance patients’ abilities in carbohydrate estimation. Existing tools for assessing patient learning outcomes in CC are discussed, highlighting the need for individualized approaches tailored to each patient’s needs. A comprehensive review of the relevant literature was conducted to identify educational programs and assessment tools dedicated to training diabetes patients on carbohydrate counting. The research aims to provide insights into the benefits and limitations of existing tools and identifies future research directions to advance personalized CC training approaches. By adopting a personalized approach to CC education and assessment, healthcare professionals can empower patients to achieve better glycemic control and improve diabetes management. Moreover, this review identifies potential avenues for future research, paving the way for advancements in personalized CC training and assessment approaches and further enhancing diabetes management strategies.

In a pandemic, the availability of health indicators among at-risk populations, such as the elderly, is vital due to the disease’s rapid transmission and the need to act quickly to contain its evolution. Traditional clinical methods for monitoring vital signs typically require contact-based sensors that must be precisely attached by a skilled healthcare professional, are less practical for repeatable measurements, and are not suitable for long-term monitoring. Contactless vital signs monitoring, such as radar-based techniques or IR-thermal imaging, on the other hand, does not require the attachment of physical electrodes and can be useful for remote health monitoring and therefore reduce physical contact between subjects and healthcare professionals, ensuring social distancing, in particular, in nursing homes, and protecting the elderly population in this way from other external factors that increase the likelihood of infection. This article presents three main contributions: (i) vital signs characterization in the elderly population; (ii) a state-of-the-art review on the most prominent techniques and methods for Contactless Health Monitoring (CHM); (iii) the design, specification, and evaluation of a low-cost proof-of-concept CHM system for nursing homes, which includes an IoT Edge Device , which enables real-time vital signs monitoring (cardio-respiratory rates and elevated body temperature) using a multimodal approach based on Doppler radar and IR thermal imaging sensors, and thus generates health indicators without any type of contact or invasiveness. By direct comparison with reference instruments, results have shown an error below 10%, in 74%, 52%, and 96% of the cases for Heart Rate, Respiratory Rate, and Body Temperature measurements, respectively.

This paper presents the design methodology used to specify a Human-in-the-Loop Cyber-Physical System (HITL-CPS) for online monitoring and active mitigation of the indoor radon gas concentration in non-residential granitic buildings with regular human occupation restricted to a work schedule, such as public buildings like administration offices, schools, kindergartens, etc. The paper follows the methodology that is being carried out in the RnMonitor R&D project in order to design the overall CPS architecture specification using the following approach: i) Conceptual Approach and Application Requirements; ii) Design Specifications and iii) Architecture Definition. At the end, main conclusions are presented alongside with a set of promising avenues for future development.

Biomedical wireless sensor networks empowers the development of new applications and services to improve the quality of medical care provided to the citizens. In such context, these networks need to be integrated on the existing network infrastructure and information systems and, at the same time, guarantee high levels of quality of service. These requirements of quality of service must be addressed on the project and development stages and monitored during the network operation. On the project stage, the requirements of quality of service must be identified and accurately characterised; on the development stage, it is necessary to implement the mechanisms that ensure its accomplishment; finally, during the network operation, it is crucial to monitor the network to evaluate its performance and manage the admission of new nodes. Another important issue related with biomedical wireless sensor networks is the network lifetime, designed to be as long as possible. This work discusses these topics and presents some achievements on the evaluation of the quality of service at the development time, on the real-time monitoring of the network performance at run time, as well as on network lifetime extension.