New sensors to monitor storm surge on bridges

Anduril Industries this week said its Lattice operating system was used to integrate multiple third-party sensors into a single dashboard during a recent exercise to provide a common operating picture […]

OKI Develops Ultracompact Photonic Integrated Circuit Chip Using Silicon Photonics Technology to Realize Various Optical Sensors  Business Wire

What difference would it make to be able to unlock ocean data at scale? How would deploying hundreds of marine sensing platforms improve marine weather predictability and accuracy? A company named Sofar is answering some of those questions these days due to their capacity to use real-time data to improve ... [continued]

The post How Networks Of Ocean Sensors Can Improve Marine Weather Predictability appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Sony's profit rose 69% in July-September from a year earlier on the back of strong sales of its image sensors, games, music and network services, the Japanese electronics and entertainment company said on Friday.

A female defendant, convicted for using aluminum foil to bypass retail anti-theft sensors, challenged the conviction by arguing the foil’s common household use.

In today’s dynamic security landscape, having sensors that offer both reliability and extended coverage is crucial.

How do you implement a sensor-based IIoT system that can fulfill your needs now and into the future?

If your food or beverage operation isn’t making widespread use of sensors to monitor your process, you can’t expect to remain competitive for long.

Evigence offers food companies and cold-chain leaders data-driven freshness insights at the case or unit level needed to boost end-to-end supply chain efficiency, guarantee food quality, reduce food loss and manage compliance.

The diagnostics of X-ray beam properties has a critical importance at the European X-ray Free-Electron Laser facility. Besides existing diagnostic components, utilization of a diamond sensor was proposed to achieve radiation-hard, non-invasive beam position and pulse energy measurements for hard X-rays. In particular, with very hard X-rays, diamond-based sensors become a useful complement to gas-based devices which lose sensitivity due to significantly reduced gas cross-sections. The measurements presented in this work were performed with diamond sensors consisting of an electronic-grade single-crystal chemical-vapor-deposition diamond with position-sensitive resistive electrodes in a duo-lateral configuration. The results show that the diamond sensor delivers pulse-resolved X-ray beam position data at 2.25 MHz with an uncertainty of less than 1% of the beam size. To our knowledge this is the first demonstration of pulse-resolved position measurements at the MHz rate using a transmissive diamond sensor at a free-electron laser facility. It can therefore be a valuable tool for X-ray free-electron lasers, especially for high-repetition-rate machines, enabling applications such as beam-based alignment and intra-pulse-train position feedback.

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Needle pricks not your thing? A team of National Science Foundation-funded scientists is developing wearable skin sensors that can detect what's in your sweat. They hope that one day, monitoring perspiration could bypass the need for more invasive procedures like blood draws, and provide real-time updates on health problems such as dehydration or fatigue. In a new paper, the team describes a new sensor design that can be rapidly manufactured using a "roll-to-roll" processing technique that essentially prints the sensors onto a sheet of plastic like words on a newspaper. They used the sensors to monitor the sweat rate, and the electrolytes and metabolites in sweat, from volunteers who were exercising, and others who were experiencing chemically induced perspiration. The new sensors contain a spiraling microscopic tube, or microfluidic, that wicks sweat from the skin. By tracking how fast the sweat moves through the microfluidic, the sensors can report how much a person is sweating, or their sweat rate. The microfluidics are also outfitted with chemical sensors that can detect concentrations of electrolytes like potassium and sodium, and metabolites like glucose.

Image credit: Bizen Maskey/Sunchon National University

Sensors provide solutions across industries and applications.

Inventor says artificial intelligence can speed up development of unique paper thin contact shape sensors for a wide range of applications and advance the use of thinner stronger metals to reduce vehicle weight and fight climate change.

Bistabledome.com describes how flex actuated overlapping bistable domes can be used to create unique flexible sensors that translate flexural forces caused by bending into digital patterns that AI can use to monitor shape and changing shape.

For fast measurements of displacement, distance and position with high accuracy and resolution, laser triangulation sensors can be used in a variety of applications. The reasons are wear-free measurement, a large measuring range, high precision and easy installation.

Novotechnik, U.S., introduces the new RSK-3200 Series of angle sensors are designed for harsh automotive and off-highway applications.

Generally speaking, there are four ‘Poors’ that can lead to incorrectly installing instrumentation sensors: Poor placement Poor control Poor protection Poor grounding Each of above sensor ‘poors’ are described below, and by the way… have you read what is the mistake No.1... Read more

The post Installing Sensors Incorrectly As a Mistake #2 In Instrumentation appeared first on EEP - Electrical Engineering Portal.

The scientific and societal case for the integration of environmental sensors into new submarine telecommunication cables

Sensors act as a middle ground between the physical and digital. They measure all sorts of variables from touch, temperature, and heart rate across many different sectors, which IDTechEx’s report “Printed and Flexible Sensors 2024-2034: Technologies, Players, Markets” explores in detail.

Would you exchange money for the convenience of not checking your tire pressure before every ride?
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For people with diabetes, glucose monitors are a valuable tool to monitor their blood sugar. The current generation of these biosensors detect glucose levels with thin, metallic filaments inserted in subcutaneous tissue, the deepest layer of the skin where most body fat is stored.

Medical technology company Biolinq is developing a new type of glucose sensor that doesn’t go deeper than the dermis, the middle layer of skin that sits above the subcutaneous tissue. The company’s “intradermal” biosensors take advantage of metabolic activity in shallower layers of skin, using an array of electrochemical microsensors to measure glucose—and other chemicals in the body—just beneath the skin’s surface.

Biolinq just concluded a pivotal clinical trial earlier this month, according to CEO Rich Yang, and the company plans to submit the device to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for approval at the end of the year. In April, Biolinq received US $58 million in funding to support the completion of its clinical trials and subsequent submission to the FDA.

Biolinq’s glucose sensor is “the world’s first intradermal sensor that is completely autonomous,” Yang says. While other glucose monitors require a smartphone or other reader to collect and display the data, Biolinq’s includes an LED display to show when the user’s glucose is within a healthy range (indicated by a blue light) or above that range (yellow light). “We’re providing real-time feedback for people who otherwise could not see or feel their symptoms,” Yang says. (In addition to this real-time feedback, the user can also load long-term data onto a smartphone by placing it next to the sensor, like Abbott’s FreeStyle Libre, another glucose monitor.)

More than 2,000 microsensor components are etched onto each 200-millimeter silicon wafer used to manufacture the biosensors.Biolinq

Biolinq’s hope is that its approach could lead to sustainable changes in behavior on the part of the individual using the sensor. The device is intentionally placed on the upper forearm to be in plain sight, so users can receive immediate feedback without manually checking a reader. “If you drink a glass of orange juice or soda, you’ll see this go from blue to yellow,” Yang explains. That could help users better understand how their actions—such as drinking a sugary beverage—change their blood sugar and take steps to reduce that effect.

Biolinq’s device consists of an array of microneedles etched onto a silicon wafer using semiconductor manufacturing. (Other glucose sensors’ filaments are inserted with an introducer needle.) Each chip has a small 2-millimeter by 2-millimeter footprint and contains seven independent microneedles, which are coated with membranes through a process similar to electroplating in jewelry making. One challenge the industry has faced is ensuring that microsensors do not break at this small scale. The key engineering insight Biolinq introduced, Yang says, was using semiconductor manufacturing to build the biosensors. Importantly, he says, silicon “is harder than titanium and steel at this scale.”

Miniaturization allows for sensing closer to the surface of the skin, where there is a high level of metabolic activity. That makes the shallow depth ideal for monitoring glucose, as well as other important biomarkers, Yang says. Due to this versatility, combined with the use of a sensor array, the device in development can also monitor lactate, an important indicator of muscle fatigue. With the addition of a third data point, ketones (which are produced when the body burns fat), Biolinq aims to “essentially have a metabolic panel on one chip,” Yang says.

Using an array of sensors also creates redundancy, improving the reliability of the device if one sensor fails or becomes less accurate. Glucose monitors tend to drift over the course of wear, but with multiple sensors, Yang says that drift can be better managed.

One downside to the autonomous display is the drain on battery life, Yang says. The battery life limits the biosensor’s wear time to 5 days in the first-generation device. Biolinq aims to extend that to 10 days of continuous wear in its second generation, which is currently in development, by using a custom chip optimized for low-power consumption rather than off-the-shelf components.

The company has collected nearly 1 million hours of human performance data, along with comparators including commercial glucose monitors and venous blood samples, Yang says. Biolinq aims to gain FDA approval first for use in people with type 2 diabetes not using insulin and later expand to other medical indications.

This article appears in the August 2024 print issue as “Glucose Monitor Takes Page From Chipmaking.”

In the United States alone, more than 100,000 people currently need a lifesaving organ transplant. Instead of waiting for donors, one way to solve this crisis in the future is to assemble replacement organs with bio-printing—3D printing that uses inks containing living cells. Scientists in Israel have found that origami techniques could help fold sensors into bio-printed materials to help determine whether they are behaving safely and properly.

Although bio-printing something as complex as a human organ is still a distant possibility, there are a host of near-term applications for the technique. For example, in drug research, scientists can bio-print living, three-dimensional tissues with which to examine the effects of various compounds.

Ideally, researchers would like to embed sensors within bio-printed items to keep track of how well they are behaving. However, the three-dimensional nature of bio-printed objects makes it difficult to lodge sensors within them in a way that can monitor every part of the structures.

“It will, hopefully in the future, allow us to monitor and assess 3D biostructures before we would like to transplant them.” —Ben Maoz, Tel Aviv University

Now scientists have developed a 3D platform inspired by origami that can help embed sensors in bio-printed objects in precise locations. “It will, hopefully in the future, allow us to monitor and assess 3D biostructures before we would like to transplant them,” says Ben Maoz, a professor of biomedical engineering at Tel Aviv University in Israel.

The new platform is a silicone rubber device that can fold around a bio-printed structure. The prototype holds a commercial array of 3D electrodes to capture electrical signals. It also possesses other electrodes that can measure electrical resistance, which can reveal how permeable cells are to various medications. A custom 3D software model can tailor the design of the origami and all the electrodes so that the sensors can be placed in specific locations in the bio-printed object.

The scientists tested their device on bio-printed clumps of brain cells. The research team also grew a layer of cells onto the origami that mimicked the blood-brain barrier, a cell layer that protects the brain from undesirable substances that the body’s blood might be carrying. By folding this combination of origami and cells onto the bio-printed structures, Maoz and his colleagues were able to monitor neural activity within the brain cells and see how their synthetic blood-brain barrier might interfere with medications intended to treat brain diseases.

Maoz says the new device can incorporate many types of sensors beyond electrodes, such as temperature or acidity sensors. It can also incorporate flowing liquid to supply oxygen and nutrients to cells, the researchers note.

Currently, this device “will mainly be used for research and not for clinical use,” Maoz says. Still, it could “significantly contribute to drug development—assessing drugs that are relevant to the brain.”

The researchers say they can use their origami device with any type of 3D tissue. For example, Maoz says they can use it on bio-printed structures made from patient cells “to help with personalized medicine and drug development.”

The origami platform could also help embed devices that can modify bio-printed objects. For instance, many artificially grown tissues function better if they are placed under the kinds of physical stresses they might normally experience within the body, and the origami platform could integrate gadgets that can exert such mechanical forces on bio-printed structures. “This can assist in accelerating tissue maturation, which might be relevant to clinical applications,” Maoz says.

The scientists detailed their findings in the 26 June issue of Advanced Science.

Learn about how microneedle sensors are transforming healthcare by enabling real-time, continuous monitoring of biomarkers through wearable, minimally invasive device.