Sensors, Volume 11, Issue 5

Magnetostrictive linear position sensors (MLPS) are high-precision sensors used in the industrial field for measuring the propagation time of ultrasonic signals in a waveguide. To date, MLPS have attracted widespread attention for their accuracy, rel...

Piezoelectric microcantilever sensors (PEMS) can be sensitive tools for the detection of proteins and cells in biological fluids. However, currently available PEMS can only be used a single time or must be completely stripped and refunctionalized pri...

This paper reviews evidence that, in addition to incidental olfactory pollutants, intentional odor delivery can impact cognitive operations both positively and negatively. Evidence for cognitive facilitation/interference is reviewed alongside four po...

This paper reports the design of a tactile sensor patch to cover large areas of robots and machines that interact with human beings. Many devices have been proposed to meet such a demand. These realizations are mostly custom-built or developed in the...

A review of research activities on opto-microfluidic sensors carried out by the research groups in Canada is presented. After a brief introduction of this exciting research field, detailed discussion is focused on different techniques for the fabrica...

Clustering is an important mechanism that efficiently provides information for mobile nodes and improves the processing capacity of routing, bandwidth allocation, and resource management and sharing. Clustering algorithms can be based on such criteri...

A new liquid crystal lens design is proposed to improve the recovery time with a ring-and-pie electrode pattern through a suitable driving scheme and using dual-frequency liquid crystals (DFLC) MLC-2048. Compared with the conventional single hole-typ...

The aim of this work was to position a Mobile Robot in an Intelligent Space, and this paper presents a sensorial system for measuring differential phase-shifts in a sinusoidally modulated infrared signal transmitted from the robot. Differential dista...

Visual sensor networks (VSNs) comprised of battery-operated electronic devices endowed with low-resolution cameras have expanded the applicability of a series of monitoring applications. Those types of sensors are interconnected by ad hoc error-prone...

In this paper, a packet loss concealment (PLC) algorithm for CELP-type speech coders is proposed in order to improve the quality of decoded speech under burst packet loss conditions in a wireless sensor network. Conventional receiver-based PLC algori...

Cellular Neural Networks (CNNs) have been widely used recently in applications such as edge detection, noise reduction and object detection, which are among the main computer imaging processes. They can also be realized as hardware based imaging sens...

This article describes a new photoacoustic FT-IR system capable of operating at elevated temperatures. The key hardware component is an optical-readout cantilever microphone that can work up to 200 °C. All parts in contact with the sample gas were pu...

The complexity of the odours issue arises from the sensory nature of smell. From the evolutionary point of view olfaction is one of the oldest senses, allowing for seeking food, recognizing danger or communication: human olfaction is a protective sen...

The reliability of implantable blood sensors is often hampered by unspecific adsorption of plasma proteins and blood cells. This not only leads to a loss of sensor signal over time, but can also result in undesired host vs. graft reactions. Within th...

We consider a problem of retrieving the extreme value among sensed data under deadline constraints in wireless sensor networks with potential applications to alarm systems. The sensed data is mapped to a score which we adopt as a unified measure of t...

Mobile Laser Scanning data were collected simultaneously with hyperspectral data using the Finnish Geodetic Institute Sensei system. The data were tested for tree species classification. The test area was an urban garden in the City of Espoo, Finland...

Although the conventional duty cycle MAC protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) such as RMAC perform well in terms of saving energy and reducing end-to-end delivery latency, they were designed independently and require an extra routing protoco...

We present a new compact electron gun based on the secondary emission through ionic bombardment principle. The driving parameters to develop such a gun are to obtain a quite small electron gun for an in-flight instrument performing Electron Beam Fluo...

Beam’s multiple-contact mode, characterized by multiple and discrete contact regions, non-uniform stoppers’ heights, irregular contact sequence, seesaw-like effect, indirect interaction between different stoppers, and complex coupling relationship b...

The development of biosensors using electrochemical methods is a promising application in the field of biotechnology. High sensitivity sensors for the bio-detection of proteins have been developed using several kinds of nanomaterials. The performance...

In the last ten to fifteen years there has been much research in using amorphous and polycrystalline semiconductors as x-ray photoconductors in various x-ray image sensor applications, most notably in flat panel x-ray imagers (FPXIs). We first outlin...

This work describes the analysis of different walking paths registered using a Light Detection And Ranging (LIDAR) laser range sensor in order to measure oscillating trajectories during unsupervised walking. The estimate of the gait and trajectory pa...

Carbon dioxide detection is a relevant issue in many fields, and this work focuses on the use of a BaTiO₃-CuO sputtered thin film layer in a gas sensor prototype for air quality measurements. For this, a double side sensor was fabricated, with a Pt h...

Behavioural assessment of experimental pain is an essential method for analysing and measuring pain levels. Rodent models, which are widely used in behavioural tests, are often subject to external forces and stressful manipulations that cause variabi...

Fungal contamination and the presence of related toxins is a widespread problem. Mycotoxin contamination has prompted many countries to establish appropriate tolerance levels. For instance, with the Commission Regulation (EC) N. 1881/2006, the Europe...

The next generation surveillance and multimedia systems will become increasingly deployed as wireless sensor networks in order to monitor parks, public places and for business usage. The convergence of data and telecommunication over IP-based network...

The adaptation of standard integrated circuit (IC) technology as a transducer in cell-based biosensors in drug discovery pharmacology, neural interface systems and electrophysiology requires electrodes that are electrochemically stable, biocompatible...

In this paper, an industrially-oriented two-scale approach is provided to model the drop-induced brittle failure of polysilicon MEMS sensors. The two length-scales here investigated are the package (macroscopic) and the sensor (mesoscopic) ones. Issu...

Losses during storage of biomass are the main parameter that defines the profitability of using preserved biomass as feed for animal husbandry. In order to minimize storage losses, potential changes in specific physicochemical properties must be iden...

In view of the fact that there are disadvantages in that the class number must be determined in advance, the value of learning rates are hard to fix, etc., when using traditional competitive neural networks (CNNs) in electronic noses (E-noses), an op...

In recent years, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been considered as a potential solution for real-time monitoring applications and these WSNs have potential practical impact on next generation technology too. However, WSNs could become a threat...

As wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are increasingly being deployed in some important applications, it becomes imperative that we consider application requirements in in-network processes. We intend to use a WSN to aid information querying and navigat...

Technological obstacles to the use of rotary-type swing arm actuators to actuate optical pickup modules in small-form-factor (SFF) disk drives stem from a hinge’s skewed actuation, subsequently inducing off-axis aberrations and deteriorating optical...

A near infrared reflectance spectroscopy (NIRS) method for rapid determination of nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium in diverse meadow grasses was developed with a view towards utilizing this material for biogas production and organic fertilizer. NI...

This work presents a multiparametric system capable of characterizing and classifying white wines according to the grape variety and geographical origin. Besides, it quantifies specific parameters of interest for quality control in wine. The system,...

Single capacitance sensors are sensitive to soil property variability. The objectives of this study were to: (i) establish site-specific laboratory calibration equations of three single capacitance sensors (EC-20, EC-10, and ML2x) for tropical soils,...

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have emerged as a viable technology for a vast number of applications, including health care applications. To best support these health care applications, WSN technology can be adopted for the design of practical Healt...

This paper proposes a hybrid crop classifier for polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. The feature sets consisted of span image, the H/A/α decomposition, and the gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) based texture features. Then, the f...

The electronic nose (e-nose) is designed to crudely mimic the mammalian nose in that most contain sensors that non-selectively interact with odor molecules to produce some sort of signal that is then sent to a computer that uses multivariate statisti...

User authentication is a crucial service in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) that is becoming increasingly common in WSNs because wireless sensor nodes are typically deployed in an unattended environment, leaving them open to possible hostile network...

Sparse representation (SR) algorithms can be implemented for high-resolution direction of arrival (DOA) estimation. Additionally, SR can effectively separate the coherent signal sources because the spectrum estimation is based on the optimization tec...

This study developed an electronic-nose sensor node based on a polymer-coated surface acoustic wave (SAW) sensor array. The sensor node comprised an SAW sensor array, a frequency readout circuit, and an Octopus II wireless module. The sensor array wa...

Classification is one of the data mining problems receiving enormous attention in the database community. Although artificial neural networks (ANNs) have been successfully applied in a wide range of machine learning applications, they are however oft...

A vapor cooling condensation system was used to deposit high quality intrinsic ZnO thin films and intrinsic ZnO nanorods as the sensing membrane of extended-gate field-effect-transistor (EGFET) glucose biosensors. The sensing sensitivity of the resul...

An innovative soft water level sensor is proposed to characterize the hydrological behaviour of agricultural catchments by measuring rainfall and stream flows. This sensor works as a capacitor coupled with a capacitance to frequency converter and mea...

The presented research introduces a new Ionic Polymer-Metal-ZnO Composite (IPMZC) demonstrating photoluminescence (PL)-quenching on mechanical bending or application of an electric field. The newly fabricated IPMZC integrates the optical properties o...

Potentiometric sensors are attractive tools for the fabrication of various electronic tongues that can be used in wide area of applications, ranging from foodstuff recognition to environmental monitoring and medical diagnostics. Their main advantages...

Acoustic wave resonator techniques are widely used in in-liquid biochemical applications. The main challenges remaining are the improvement of sensitivity and limit of detection, as well as multianalysis capabilities and reliability. The sensitivity...

Generally, AT-cut quartz crystals have a limited scope of use when it comes to high-precision measurement of very small impedance changes due to their nonlinear frequency-temperature characteristics in the range between 0 °C and 50 °C. The new method...

We consider a problem of high-resolution array radar/SAR imaging formalized in terms of a nonlinear ill-posed inverse problem of nonparametric estimation of the power spatial spectrum pattern (SSP) of the random wavefield scattered from a remotely se...