2012 February - 65 articles
Prevalent incidents support the notion that toxins, produced by bacteria, fungi, plants or animals are increasingly responsible for food poisoning or intoxication. Owing to their high toxicity some toxins are also regarded as potential biological war...
The feasibility of using a diffuse reflectance probe attached to a near infrared spectrometer to monitor the total ammonia nitrogen (TAN) content in an anaerobic digester run on cattle manure was investigated; as a previous study has indicated that t...
For decades, underwater acoustic communication has been restricted to the point-to-point long distance applications such as deep sea probes and offshore oil fields. For this reason, previous acoustic modems were typically characterized by high data r...
The photoplethysmographic waveform sits at the core of the most used, and arguably the most important, clinical monitor, the pulse oximeter. Interestingly, the pulse oximeter was discovered while examining an artifact during the development of a noni...
Gait analysis using wearable sensors is an inexpensive, convenient, and efficient manner of providing useful information for multiple health-related applications. As a clinical tool applied in the rehabilitation and diagnosis of medical conditions an...
During the last years, proteomics has facilitated biomarker discovery by coupling high-throughput techniques with novel nanosensors. In the present review, we focus on the study of label-based and label-free detection systems, as well as nanotechnolo...
Aptamers are artificial nucleic acid ligands that can be generated by in vitro selection through partition and amplification. Aptamers can be generated against a wide range of biomolecules through the formation of versatile stem-loop structures. Beca...
As olfactory perceptions vary from person to person, it is difficult to describe smells objectively. In contrast, electronic noses also detect smells with their sensors, but in addition describe those using electronic signals. Here we showed a virtua...
Integrated CMOS Hall sensors have been widely used to measure magnetic fields. However, they are difficult to work with in a low magnetic field environment due to their low sensitivity and large offset. This paper describes a highly sensitive digital...
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are gaining tremendous importance thanks to their broad range of commercial applications such as in smart home automation, health-care and industrial automation. In these applications multi-vendor and heterogeneous sen...
This paper describes the characteristics of optical fiber sensors with surface plasmon resonance (SPR) at 1,310 nm in which the scattering loss of silica optical fiber is low. SPR operation in the infrared wavelength range is achieved by coating a th...
Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) are currently being considered in the space sector due to its suitable level of performance for spacecrafts in terms of mechanical robustness with low power consumption, small mass and size, and significant adv...
Current mobile phones come with several sensors and powerful video cameras. These video cameras can be used to capture good quality scenes, which can be complemented with the information gathered by the sensors also embedded in the phones. For exampl...
In this paper, a PVDF film sensor was used to measure the transient responses of a cantilever beam subjected to an impact loading. The measurement capability of a PVDF sensor is affected by the area of the PVDF film sensor and the signal conditioner...
Underwater communication channels are often complicated, and in particular multipath propagation may cause intersymbol interference (ISI). This paper addresses how to remove ISI, and evaluates the performance of three different receiver structures an...
We report an optical refractive index sensor system based on a planar Bragg grating which is functionalized by substituted γ-cyclodextrin to determine low concentrations of naphthalene in solvent vapor. The sensor system exhibits a quasi-instantaneou...
In Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs), localization is one of most important technologies since it plays a critical role in many applications. Motivated by widespread adoption of localization, in this paper, we present a comprehensive survey...
This paper proposes a novel hardware implementation of a dense recovery of stereovision 3D measurements. Traditionally 3D stereo systems have imposed the maximum number of stereo correspondences, introducing a large restriction on artificial vision a...
Hand-held near-infrared (NIR) optical imagers are developed by various researchers towards non-invasive clinical breast imaging. Unlike these existing imagers that can perform only reflectance imaging, a generation-2 (Gen-2) hand-held optical imager...
Because of their small size, passive nature, immunity to electromagnetic interference, and capability to directly measure physical parameters such as temperature and strain, fiber Bragg grating sensors have developed beyond a laboratory curiosity and...
There have been only few studies to substantiate the kinematic characteristics of cursor movement. In this study, a quantitative experimental research method was used to explore the effect of moving direction on the kinematics of cursor movement in 2...
Water monitoring is important in domains including documenting climate change, weather prediction and fishing. This paper presents a simple and energy efficient localization strategy for near surface buoy based sensors. Sensors can be dropped randoml...
We present a study of an electrical model of electromechanically active carbon-polymer composite (CPC) with carbide-derived carbon (CDC) electrodes. The major focus is on investigation of surface electrode behavior upon external bending of the materi...
Methodologies and algorithms are presented for the secure cooperation of a team of autonomous mobile underwater sensors, connected through an acoustic communication network, within surveillance and patrolling applications. In particular, the work pro...
The mean shift algorithm has achieved considerable success in target tracking due to its simplicity and robustness. However, the lack of spatial information may result in its failure to get high tracking precision. This might be even worse when the t...
Studies on fault detection and diagnosis of planetary gearboxes are quite limited compared with those of fixed-axis gearboxes. Different from fixed-axis gearboxes, planetary gearboxes exhibit unique behaviors, which invalidate fault diagnosis methods...
Finger vein patterns have recently been recognized as an effective biometric identifier. In this paper, we propose a finger vein recognition method based on a personalized best bit map (PBBM). Our method is rooted in a local binary pattern based meth...
The present study investigates the effects of thermal conduction and convection on self-heating temperatures and bimetallic deflections produced in doped microcantilever sensors. These cantilevers are commonly used as sensors and actuators in microsy...
This paper presents an architecture for computing vector disparity for active vision systems as used on robotics applications. The control of the vergence angle of a binocular system allows us to efficiently explore dynamic environments, but requires...
We have developed a novel microarray technology based on total internal reflection fluorescence (TIRF) in combination with DNA and protein bioassays immobilized at the TIRF surface. Unlike conventional microarrays that exhibit reduced signal-to-backg...
Completely noninvasive monitoring of hemoglobin concentration has not yet been fully realized in the clinical setting. This study investigates the viability of measuring hemoglobin concentration noninvasively by evaluating the performance of two type...
Deploying a multi-hop underwater acoustic sensor network (UASN) in a large area brings about new challenges in reliable data transmissions and survivability of network due to the limited underwater communication range/bandwidth and the limited energy...
Impervious surface area (ISA) is considered as an indicator of environment change and is regarded as an important input parameter for hydrological cycle simulation, water management and area pollution assessment. The Pearl River Delta (PRD), the 3rd...
In this paper, a gait analysis system which estimates step length and foot angles is proposed. A measurement unit, which consists of a camera and inertial sensors, is installed on a shoe. When the foot touches the floor, markers are recognized by the...
When a mobile wireless sensor is moving along heterogeneous wireless sensor networks, it can be under the coverage of more than one network many times. In these situations, the Vertical Handoff process can happen, where the mobile sensor decides to c...
A wireless medical sensor network (WMSN) can sense humans’ physiological signs without sacrificing patient comfort and transmit patient vital signs to health professionals’ hand-held devices. The patient physiological data are highly sensitive and WM...
Recent drug discovery efforts have utilized high throughput screening (HTS) of large chemical libraries to identify compounds that modify the activity of discrete molecular targets. The molecular target approach to drug screening is widely used in th...
In the last decade the use of nanomaterials has been having a great impact in biosensing. In particular, the unique properties of noble metal nanoparticles have allowed for the development of new biosensing platforms with enhanced capabilities in the...
As the Internet evolved, social networks (such as Facebook) have bloomed and brought together an astonishing number of users. Mashing up mobile phones and sensors with these social environments enables the creation of people-centric sensing systems w...
Social interactions are a very important component in people’s lives. Social network analysis has become a common technique used to model and quantify the properties of social interactions. In this paper, we propose an integrated framework to explore...
This paper presents a signal processing technique to improve angular rate accuracy of the gyroscope by combining the outputs of an array of MEMS gyroscope. A mathematical model for the accuracy improvement was described and a Kalman filter (KF) was d...
The pervasive use of wireless sensors in a growing spectrum of human activities reinforces the need for devices with low energy dissipation. In this work, coded communication between a couple of wireless sensor devices is considered as a method to re...
Initially described in 1990, Pseudomonas fluorescens HK44 served as the first whole-cell bioreporter genetically endowed with a bioluminescent (luxCDABE) phenotype directly linked to a catabolic (naphthalene degradative) pathway. HK44 was the first g...
This article presents a novel closed loop control architecture based on audio channels of several types of computing devices, such as mobile phones and tablet computers, but not restricted to them. The communication is based on an audio interface tha...
Neonatal sepsis is still a leading cause of death among newborns. Therefore a protein-microarray for point-of-care testing that simultaneously quantifies the sepsis associated serum proteins IL-6, IL-8, IL-10, TNF alpha, S-100, PCT, E-Selectin, CRP a...
This paper introduces a flexible hardware and software architecture for a smart video sensor. This sensor has been applied in a video surveillance application where some of these video sensors are deployed, constituting the sensory nodes of a distrib...
This paper presents a proposal for an Artificial Neural Network (ANN)-based architecture for completion and prediction of data retrieved by underwater sensors. Due to the specific conditions under which these sensors operate, it is not uncommon for t...
We have proposed in this paper an embedded palmprint recognition system using the dual-core OMAP 3530 platform. An improved algorithm based on palm code was proposed first. In this method, a Gabor wavelet is first convolved with the palmprint image t...
Personal recognition through hand-based biometrics has attracted the interest of many researchers in the last twenty years. A significant number of proposals based on different procedures and acquisition devices have been published in the literature....
Sensors and multi-sensor arrays are the basis of new technologies for the non-label monitoring of cell activity. In this paper we show that choroid plexus cells can be cultured on silicon chips and that sensors register in real time changes in their...
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