The Impact of Wearable Electronics in Assessing the Effectiveness of Levodopa Treatment in Parkinson's Disease.

OBJECTIVE: In order to evaluate Parkinson disease patients' response to therapeutic interventions, sources of information are mainly patient reports and clinicians' assessment of motor functions. However, these sources can suffer from patient's subjectivity and from inter/intra rater's score variability. Our work aimed at determining the impact of wearable electronics and data analysis in objectifying the effectiveness of levodopa treatment. METHODS: Seven motor tasks performed by thirty-six patients were measured by wearable electronics and related data were analyzed. This was at the time of therapy initiation (T0), and repeated after six (T1) and 12 months (T2). Wearable electronics consisted of inertial measurement units each equipped with 3-axis accelerometer and 3-axis gyroscope, while data analysis of ANOVA and Pearson correlation algorithms, in addition to a support vector machine (SVM) classification. RESULTS: According to our findings, levodopa-based therapy alters the patient's conditions in general, ameliorating something (e.g., bradykinesia), leaving unchanged others (e.g., tremor), but with poor correlation to the levodopa dose. CONCLUSION: A technology-based approach can objectively assess levodopa-based therapy effectiveness. SIGNIFICANCE: Novel devices can improve the accuracy of the assessment of motor function, by integrating the clinical evaluation and patient reports.

Coaxial Monitoring of AISI 316L Thin Walls Fabricated by Direct Metal Laser Deposition.

Direct metal laser deposition (DMLD) is an additive manufacturing technique suitable for coating and repair, which has been gaining a growing interest in 3D manufacturing applications in recent years. However, its diffusion in the manufacturing industry is still limited due to technical challenges to be solved-both the sub-optimal quality of the final parts and the low repeatability of the process make the DMLD inadequate for high-value applications requiring high-performance standards. Thus, real-time monitoring and process control are indispensable requirements for improving the DMLD process. The aim of this study was the optimization of deposition strategies for the fabrication of thin walls in AISI 316L stainless steel. For this purpose, a coaxial monitoring system and image processing algorithms were employed to study the melt pool geometry. The comparison tests carried out highlighted how the region-based active contour algorithm used for image processing is more efficient and stable than others covered in the literature. The results allowed the identification of the best deposition strategy. Therefore, it is shown how this monitoring methodology proved to be suitable for designing and implementing the right building strategy for DMLD manufactured 3D components. A fast and stable image processing method was achieved, which can be considered for future closed-loop monitoring in real-time applications.

Bending Sensors Based on Thin Films of Semitransparent Bithiophene-Fulleropyrrolidine Bisadducts.

A novel bithiophene-fulleropyrrolidine bisadducts system (bis-Th2PC60 ) was synthesized and electropolymerized by chronoamperometry onto flexible ITO/PET substrates. The resulting semitransparent thin film was characterized by XPS, FT-IR, cyclic voltammetry and optical techniques, confirming the good outcome of the electropolymerization process. AFM investigations permitted to highlight an inherent disordered granular morphology, in which the grain-to-grain separation depends upon the application of bending. The electrical resistance of the thin film was characterized as a function of bending (in the range 0°-90°), showing promising responsivity to low bending angles (10°-30°). The ΔR/R0 variations turn out to be 8 %,16 % and 20 % for bending angles equal to 10°, 20° and 30°, respectively. This study represents a first step towards the understanding of piezoresistive properties in electropolymerized fullerenes-based thin films, opening up applications as bending sensor.

Sign Language Recognition Using Wearable Electronics: Implementing k-Nearest Neighbors with Dynamic Time Warping and Convolutional Neural Network Algorithms.

We propose a sign language recognition system based on wearable electronics and two different classification algorithms. The wearable electronics were made of a sensory glove and inertial measurement units to gather fingers, wrist, and arm/forearm movements. The classifiers were k-Nearest Neighbors with Dynamic Time Warping (that is a non-parametric method) and Convolutional Neural Networks (that is a parametric method). Ten sign-words were considered from the Italian Sign Language: cose, grazie, maestra, together with words with international meaning such as google, internet, jogging, pizza, television, twitter, and ciao. The signs were repeated one-hundred times each by seven people, five male and two females, aged 29-54 y ± 10.34 (SD). The adopted classifiers performed with an accuracy of 96.6% ± 3.4 (SD) for the k-Nearest Neighbors plus the Dynamic Time Warping and of 98.0% ± 2.0 (SD) for the Convolutional Neural Networks. Our system was made of wearable electronics among the most complete ones, and the classifiers top performed in comparison with other relevant works reported in the literature.

Oil-in-Water fL Droplets by Interfacial Spontaneous Fragmentation and Their Electrical Characterization.

Inkjet printing is here employed for the first time as a method to produce femtoliter-scale oil droplets dispersed in water. In particular, picoliter-scale fluorinated oil (FC40) droplets are printed in the presence of perfluoro-1-octanol surfactant at a velocity higher than 5 m/s. Femtoliter-scale oil droplets in water are spontaneously formed through a fragmentation process at the water/air interface using minute amounts of nonionic surfactant (down to 0.003% v/v of Tween 80). This fragmentation occurs by a Plateau-Rayleigh mechanism at a moderately high Weber number (101). A microfluidic chip with integrated microelectrodes allows droplets characterization in terms of number and diameter distribution (peaked at about 3 µm) by means of electrical impedance measurements. These results show an unprecedented possibility to scale oil droplets down to the femtoliter scale, which opens up several perspectives for a tailored oil-in-water emulsion fabrication for drug encapsulation, pharmaceutic preparations, and cellular biology.

Wearable-based electronics to objectively support diagnosis of motor impairments in school-aged children.

Developmental coordination disorder (DCD) and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are neuro-developmental disorders, starting in childhood, which can affect the planning of movements and the coordination. We investigated how and in which measure a system based on wearable inertial measurement units (IMUs) can provide an objective support to the diagnosis of motor impairments in school-aged children. The IMUs measured linear and rotational movements of 37 schoolchildren, 7-10yo, 17 patients and 20 control subjects, during the execution of motor exercises, performed under medical and psychiatric supervision, to assess different aspects of the motor coordination. The measured motor parameters showed a high degree of significance in discriminating the ADHD/DCD patients from the healthy subjects, pointing out which motor tasks are worth focusing on. So, medical doctors have a novel key lecture to state a diagnosis, gaining in objectivity with respect to the standard procedures which mainly involve subjective human judgment. Differently to other works, we propose a novel approach in terms of number of used IMUs and of performed motor tasks. Moreover, we demonstrate the meaningful parameters to be considered as more discriminant in supporting the medical diagnosis.

High-Density ZnO Nanowires as a Reversible Myogenic-Differentiation Switch.

Mesoangioblasts are outstanding candidates for stem-cell therapy and are already being explored in clinical trials. However, a crucial challenge in regenerative medicine is the limited availability of undifferentiated myogenic progenitor cells because growth is typically accompanied by differentiation. Here reversible myogenic-differentiation switching during proliferation is achieved by functionalizing the glass substrate with high-density ZnO nanowires (NWs). Specifically, mesoangioblasts grown on ZnO NWs present a spherical viable undifferentiated cell state without lamellopodia formation during the entire observation time (8 days). Consistently, the myosin heavy chain, typically expressed in skeletal muscle tissue and differentiated myogenic progenitors, is completely absent. Remarkably, NWs do not induce any damage while they reversibly block differentiation, so that the differentiation capabilities are completely recovered upon cell removal from the NW-functionalized substrate and replating on standard culture glass. This is the first evidence of a reversible myogenic-differentiation switch that does not affect the viability. These results can be the first step toward for the in vitro growth of a large number of undifferentiated stem/progenitor cells and therefore can represent a breakthrough for cell-based therapy and tissue engineering.

Coplanar electrode microfluidic chip enabling accurate sheathless impedance cytometry.

Microfluidic impedance cytometry offers a simple non-invasive method for single-cell analysis. Coplanar electrode chips are especially attractive due to ease of fabrication, yielding miniaturized, reproducible, and ultimately low-cost devices. However, their accuracy is challenged by the dependence of the measured signal on particle trajectory within the interrogation volume, that manifests itself as an error in the estimated particle size, unless any kind of focusing system is used. In this paper, we present an original five-electrode coplanar chip enabling accurate particle sizing without the need for focusing. The chip layout is designed to provide a peculiar signal shape from which a new metric correlating with particle trajectory can be extracted. This metric is exploited to correct the estimated size of polystyrene beads of 5.2, 6 and 7 µm nominal diameter, reaching coefficient of variations lower than the manufacturers' quoted values. The potential impact of the proposed device in the field of life sciences is demonstrated with an application to Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast.

Chromium inhibition and size-selected Au nanocluster catalysis for the solution growth of low-density ZnO nanowires.

The wet chemical synthesis of nanostructures has many crucial advantages over high-temperature methods, including simplicity, low-cost, and deposition on almost arbitrary substrates. Nevertheless, the density-controlled solution growth of nanowires still remains a challenge, especially at the low densities (e.g. 1 to 10 nanowires/100 µm(2)) required, as an example, for intracellular analyses. Here, we demonstrate the solution-growth of ZnO nanowires using a thin chromium film as a nucleation inhibitor and Au size-selected nanoclusters (SSNCs) as catalytic particles for which the density and, in contrast with previous reports, size can be accurately controlled. Our results also provide evidence that the enhanced ZnO hetero-nucleation is dominated by Au SSNCs catalysis rather than by layer adaptation. The proposed approach only uses low temperatures (≤70 °C) and is therefore suitable for any substrate, including printed circuit boards (PCBs) and the plastic substrates which are routinely used for cell cultures. As a proof-of-concept we report the density-controlled synthesis of ZnO nanowires on flexible PCBs, thus opening the way to assembling compact intracellular-analysis systems, including nanowires, electronics, and microfluidics, on a single substrate.