Robot-Enabled Support of Daily Activities in Smart Home Environments.

Smart environments offer valuable technologies for activity monitoring and health assessment. Here, we describe an integration of robots into smart environments to provide more interactive support of individuals with functional limitations. RAS, our Robot Activity Support system, partners smart environment sensing, object detection and mapping, and robot interaction to detect and assist with activity errors that may occur in everyday settings. We describe the components of the RAS system and demonstrate its use in a smart home testbed. To evaluate the usability of RAS, we also collected and analyzed feedback from participants who received assistance from RAS in a smart home setting as they performed routine activities.

3D Coaxial Bioprinting: Process Mechanisms, Bioinks and Applications.

In the last decade, bioprinting has emerged as a facile technique for fabricating tissues constructs mimicking the architectural complexity and compositional heterogeneity of native tissues. Amongst different bioprinting modalities, extrusion-based bioprinting (EBB) is the most widely used technique. Coaxial bioprinting, a type of EBB, enables fabrication of concentric cell-material layers and enlarges the scope of EBB to mimic several key aspects of native tissues. Over the period of development of bioprinting, tissue constructs integrated with vascular networks, have been one of the major achievements made possible largely by coaxial bioprinting. In this review, current advancements in biofabrication of constructs with coaxial bioprinting are discussed with a focus on different bioinks that are particularly suitable for this modality. This review also expounds the properties of different bioinks suitable for coaxial bioprinting and then analyses the key achievements made by the application of coaxial bioprinting in tissue engineering, drug delivery and in-vitro disease modelling. The major limitations and future perspectives on the critical factors that will determine the ultimate clinical translation of the versatile technique are also presented to the reader.

Micro additive manufacturing of glucose biosensors: A feasibility study.

Flexible electrochemical sensors for measurement and quantification of biomarkers are attracting a great deal of attention in non-invasive medical applications, due to their high mechanical compatibility and conformability with the human body. Realization of the full potential of such novel systems relies heavily on their effective manufacturing. Particularly, there is a need for manufacturing techniques that can realize complex designs, consisting of multiple functional materials which are required for sensor functionality. Among emerging additive manufacturing techniques, Direct-Ink-Writing (DIW), where polymer nanocomposite inks are dispensed through nozzles and deposited with high spatial control, carries a great potential to address this need. Here, we introduce a 3D printed flexible electrochemical biosensor for glucose detection. We show that our biosensor works linearly in glucose solution with a concentration range between 100 and 1000 µM. The sensitivity of glucose biosensor is estimated to be 17.5 nA µM-1, and the calculated value of the detection limit (S/N = 3) is 6.9 µM. The demonstrated electrochemical performance and surface properties of the printed sensors show the promising advantages of using this technique over the conventional screen printing method. These advantages include higher sensitivity and specificity and, reduced material consumption.