West Lafayette, Indiana – Heart surgery can be traumatic for patients. Having to continuously monitor your status without a doctor when you are back home can be even scarier. Imagine being able to do that with a simple sticker applied to your body.

Purdue University researchers have advanced a sticker solution moving it several steps closer to reality. The research was recently published in ACS Advanced Materials and Interfaces.

Watch about it here: http://bit.ly/EPED-Purdue.

“For the first time, we have created wearable electronic devices that someone can easily attach to their skin and are made out of paper to lower the cost of personalized medicine,” says Ramses Martinez, a Purdue assistant professor of industrial engineering and biomedical engineering, who led the research team.

Their technology aligns with Purdue's Giant Leaps celebration, acknowledging the university’s global advancements made in health as part of Purdue’s 150th anniversary. This is one of the four themes of the yearlong celebration’s Ideas Festival, designed to showcase Purdue as an intellectual center solving real-world issues.

The “smart stickers” are made of cellulose, which is both biocompatible and breathable. They can be used to monitor physical activity and alert a wearer about possible health risks in real time.

Health professionals could use the Purdue stickers as implantable sensors to monitor the sleep of patients because they conform to internal organs without causing any adverse reactions. Athletes could also use the technology to monitor their health while exercising and swimming.

These stickers are patterned in serpentine shapes to make the devices as thin and stretchable as skin, making them imperceptible for the wearer.

Since paper degrades fast when it gets wet and human skin is prone to be covered in sweat, these stickers were coated with molecules that repel water, oil, dust and bacteria. Each sticker costs about a nickel to produce and can be made using printing and manufacturing technologies similar to those used to print books at high speed.

“The low cost of these wearable devices and their compatibility with large-scale manufacturing techniques will enable the quick adoption of these new fully disposable, wearable sensors in a variety of health care applications requiring single-use diagnostic systems,” Martinez notes.

The technology is patented through the Purdue Office of Technology Commercialization. They are continuing to look for partners to test and commercialize their technology.

The floppy disk was once the cutting edge of storage, its design slowly decreasing in size as technology progressed. Over nearly 40 years of popularity the common expectation was that the next step in storage would, again, be an even smaller floppy disk. But technological advances were to reshape the future of storage with an entirely new approach, that broke a variety of misconceptions that existed about data storage. Harel Boren, CEO of Inspekto and the founder of Autonomous Machine Vision, explains the truth behind some common machine vision misconceptions.

The introduction of the USB drive led to the eventual decline of the floppy disk, which is now banished to the history books of storage. As the machine vision industry goes on to embrace autonomous machine vision, misconceptions remain.

Cost limits what’s possible
Installing a machine vision solution is viewed as an expensive process. This is because traditional machine vision solutions require a major effort and continuous investment on top of upfront costs. Installing and maintaining a traditional solution is a complex process that requires expertise. The combined cost of these professional services with cameras, lenses, lighting and more, turn traditional solutions into an expensive business - in the region of $23,000 to $170,000 or more, per inspection point.

Because these solutions are tailored to a particular point in the production line, they are also inflexible, made to work for only one product at one point on one production line. This means adding additional quality assurance points to the line can cause costs to spiral.

None of this is true with autonomous machine vision, where a system is standalone, simple and quick to setup - making it affordable. In fact, an autonomous machine vision system should typically be installed at one-tenth the cost and at up to 1,000x the speed of planning and installing a traditional solution. Thanks to speed and affordability, it can be installed at any stage of the production line – and moved to a new location in minutes when required.

A systems integrator is essential
Because traditional machine vision is a complex process, there is a misconception that the industry will always rely on the expertise of a systems integrator. The machine vision ecosystem has for many years aligned itself to the systems integrator, the only party equipped with the expertise needed to build a solution. Once the solution is installed, a systems integrator is required for every set up and changeover on the production line.

In the age of autonomous machine vision, systems integrators are no longer required. The manufacturer can install a visual quality assurance (QA) system out of the box in minutes. Because autonomous machine vision systems can self-set and self-adjust, the manufacturer is able to do this independently at any point on the production line.  Just like the floppy disk, the systems integrator becomes obsolete.

Machine vision will never be plug and play
Since the 1980s, manufacturers have used machine vision technology for quality assurance. The process has always involved building a tailored solution, piecing together the right filters, lenses, lighting, and cameras. Over weeks or even months, the integrator must continue setting proof of concepts (POC), testing plans, programming, and more – leaving plug and play visual QA as a far-fetched dream. As written by Fred Grootentraast from ICT Group in 2016 in Machine vision is not plug and play, “The success of machine vision is dependent on the use of the right hardware and software and this requires specialized knowledge of both disciplines.”

Though this was once true, autonomous machine vision now brings the capability to simply plug and inspect. New technology, such as Inspekto’s S70 system, mean that in 30 minutes, any member of staff could install a system and start performing effective visual QA.

Just as the next step in storage was not a smaller floppy disk, but an entirely new approach, autonomous machine vision is a new era in visual QA.

“Metal 3D Printing Services: Service Revenues, Printer Purchases and Materials Consumption – 2018 To 2027” released by Smartechmarkets covers:

New directions and strategies for service bureaus: Metal printing is challenging and expertise in this area may protect service bureau from losing business to end users who buy their own printers. Some service bureaus believe additive manufacturing is a tool that can take market share from traditional metal working firms. Will the new desktop metal printing technology create new opportunities for service bureaus?

Metal powder firm strategies for the service bureau sector: These strategies include both increasing sales of metal powders to service bureau and growing metal powder businesses by entering the service bureau directly.

© credit | www.smartechpublishing.com

\Service bureau opportunities for traditional third-party suppliers – hybrid manufacturing strategies: Some traditional machine shops have become early adopters of metal additive manufacturing. Metal 3D printing processes are increasingly used by third-party parts and prototype firms, leading to hybrid manufacturing arrangements incorporating 3D printing along with established processes such as casting.

The future of 3D printer makers in the metal service bureau industry: Selling more metal machines to service bureaus, while strengthening their own metal service offerings.

This report provides 10-year forecasts of service provider revenues, broken out by type of service provider; along with the projections of printers, processes, and the types of metals used by service providers of different types. In addition, we analyze the future goals and strategies of leading firms – including printer makers – who make metal 3DP services a major part of their business activities.

Nathan Copeland, who was paralyzed from the chest down in a car accident, controls a prosthetic arm and hand at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Credit: Pitt/UPMC

A team of researchers at the University of Chicago has received a $3.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to help develop robotic arms patients can control with their minds that receive sensory feedback from attached prosthetic hands.

The new grant is part of a combined $7 million awarded to UChicago, Pitt, and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) to continue their collaboration developing prosthetics with a brain computer interface (BCI) for paralyzed patients. In 2016, the team demonstrated how a clinical trial participant was able to control a robotic arm with his mind and regain the sense of touch through its hand.

The new grant will expand the clinical trial to UChicago, where the project will be led by Sliman Bensmaia, PhD, who studies the sense of touch, and Nicho Hatsopoulos, PhD, who researches how the brain directs movement in the limbs. John Downey, PhD, a staff scientist in Bensmaia's lab who formerly worked with the Pitt team, will coordinate research activities. Neurosurgeon Peter Warnke, MD, will perform surgical procedures to implant the devices, and Raymond Lee, MD, a physical rehabilitation specialist from Schwab Rehabilitation Hospital in Chicago, will recruit subjects and provide guidance on the patient population involved.

"Our goal is to create a prosthesis that has the same dexterity and functionality as the natural human hand," Bensmaia says. "UChicago has the benefit of years of experience with both motor neuroscience and somatosensory research, and we look forward to continuing that work with our partners at Pitt and UPMC."

The research team at Pitt and UPMC is led by Michael Boninger, MD, and includes Jennifer Collinger, PhD, Robert Gaunt, PhD, and Elizabeth Tyler-Kabara, MD, PhD. That team has worked with two Pittsburgh area clinical trial participants since 2012, both of whom had paralysis of their arms and hands. The new project will recruit two more such patients at each site.

The robotic neuroprosthetic system works by implanting arrays of electrodes in areas of the brain that control movement and process the sense of touch from a natural limb. The electrodes pick up activity in neurons as the patient thinks about moving their own arm to direct the robotic arm to move accordingly. The prosthetic hand is fitted with sensors to detect sensations of touch, such as pressing on individual fingertips, which in turn generates electrical signals that stimulate the appropriate areas of the brain.

The prosthetics will incorporate years of research by Bensmaia and Hatsopoulos on how the nervous system interprets sensory feedback, directs limbs to move and perceives them in space. Bensmaia's lab has developed software algorithms to recreate the sense of touch with the BCI using a biomimetic approach that mimics the way someone's natural nervous system would communicate signals from the hand to the brain. Hatsopoulos studies motor control and how brain cells work together to coordinate and learn complex movements of the arm and hand.

"BCI control in the past has focused on moving the limb in free space. Our project will attempt to solve the difficult challenge of controlling the hand when it comes in contact with and manipulates objects," Hatsopoulos says.

The research team at UChicago will continue to refine the previous work with their partners in Pittsburgh to incorporate greater dexterity and more precise movements into the prosthetics.

"Having a human patient lets us do all kinds of things we couldn't do before," Bensmaia says. "You can probe the quality of sensations being invoked by asking them what they feel. You can sculpt movements to make more natural and precise. This opens a new world for us here at the University of Chicago."