Thoracic shape changes in newborns due to their position

The highly compliant nature of the neonatal chest wall is known to clinicians. However, its morphological changes have never been characterized and are especially important for a customised monitoring of respiratory diseases. Here, we show that a device applied on newborns can trace their chest boundary without the use of radiation. Such technology, which is easy to sanitise between patients, works like a smart measurement tape drawing also a digital cross section of the chest. We also show that in neonates the supine position generates a significantly different cross section compared to the lateral ones. Lastly, an unprecedented comparison between a premature neonate and a child is reported.

An integrated circuit to null standby using energy provided by MEMS sensors

The advent of smart measurement systems and innovative wireless sensor networks evinces the necessity to develop novel solutions for conditioning circuits to be used in autonomous or quasi autonomous measurement systems and sensing nodes. The main problem these systems still face is the question of how to supply the nodes in a cost-effective way, considering that, very often, a battery is required, and consequently, the maintenance labor and cost to replace or recharge it may be high. The main target is to increase battery lifetime by decreasing unnecessary energy consumption as much as possible. In this context, several solutions, including energy harvesters, have already been proposed. One of the main solutions is the reduction of power consumption by the measurement device while in standby, which, in most cases, represents a significant amount of the total power dissipation. To this end, authors have already addressed a zero-energy standby solution able to supply the power requested by the measurement equipment only when the appliance is turned on. In this paper, we present an integrated circuit solution suitable to be used with MEMS scale transducers. The validation and the characterisation of the system will be shown to demonstrate the suitability of the proposed method.

Providing enhanced security in IoT based smart weather system

Weather reporting system consist multiple devices which are playing dynamic role in producing dynamic environmental parameters such as temperature, humidity, and air pollution. It was a tedious task to bring all the devices together and make them interleaving to produce relevant measurement. Recent trends have proven that the IoT has brought all the devices and peripherals in one place to make more flexible and smart measurement. In the traditional weather monitoring system measurement method is not real time, not continuous and also tedious job to take continuous measurement. But, the IoT has completely changed the measurement scenario and improved the consistency of the measurement. In the present work the environmental parameters such rainfall, temperature, humidity, and density of carbon dioxide in the air are measured with sensors. The Arduino Uno card gathers all information from the devices which are associated with its port pins. The information is sent to cloud server for record and future retrieving. At the same time the data security in cloud been assured with encryption and decryption data while retrieving the information from cloud. This enhances the security, ease of accessing the cloud data from mobile applications, provides wise predictions and minimizes the communication overhead.

Developing Smart Measurement Device to Measure Kinetic Friction Coefficients of Bi-Tilt Isolator

A sliding vibration isolation system, affected by a kinetic friction force, provides a flexible or energy dissipation system for a structure. The kinetic friction coefficient of the contact surfaces between the moving parts changes with the relative moving velocity of the two contact surfaces. In this study, a smart measuring device is proposed to measure the kinetic friction coefficients of materials. The Arduino boards Arduino Nano, Arduino MPU-9250, and Arduino SD modules were combined to create this proposed smart device and mounted on three aluminum extrusions constructed as a horizontal platform. Then, varying amounts of steel gaskets were applied to adjust the various slopes for sliding tests. The time history of the acceleration and displacement responses of test object movements in the sliding process were respectively, recorded and detected by this proposed smart measuring device and the digital image correlation method (DIC). Statistical analyses of all test responses were used to derive the relationship of velocity to kinetic friction coefficient. Test and analysis results showed that (1) the relationship of velocity to kinetic friction coefficient for the conditions of mild lubrication and no lubrication displayed a trend of first decreasing and then increasing with increasing speed, respectively and (2) the relationship of velocity to kinetic friction coefficient for the condition of full lubrication revealed that the kinetic friction coefficient decreased with increasing speed. Test results demonstrated that this proposed smart measurement device, which is low in price and easy to assemble, can easily measure the kinetic friction coefficient of a material under various lubrication conditions.