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This paper aims to concentrate on recent innovations in flexible wearable sensor technology tailored for monitoring vital signals within the contexts of wearable sensors and systems developed specifically for monitoring health and fitness metrics.

In recent decades, wearable sensors for monitoring vital signals in sports and health have advanced greatly. Vital signals include electrocardiogram, electroencephalogram, electromyography, inertial data, body motions, cardiac rate and bodily fluids like blood and sweating, making them a good choice for sensing devices.

This report reviewed reputable journal articles on wearable sensors for vital signal monitoring, focusing on multimode and integrated multi-dimensional capabilities like structure, accuracy and nature of the devices, which may offer a more versatile and comprehensive solution.

The paper provides essential information on the present obstacles and challenges in this domain and provide a glimpse into the future directions of wearable sensors for the detection of these crucial signals. Importantly, it is evident that the integration of modern fabricating techniques, stretchable electronic devices, the Internet of Things and the application of artificial intelligence algorithms has significantly improved the capacity to efficiently monitor and leverage these signals for human health monitoring, including disease prediction.

Identification of the direction of the sound source is very important for human–machine interfacing in the applications such as target detection on military applications and wildlife conservation. Considering its vast applications, this study aims to design, simulate, fabricate and test a bidirectional acoustic sensor having two cantilever structures coated with piezoresistive material for sensing has been designed, simulated, fabricated and tested.

The structure is a piezoresistive acoustic pressure sensor, which consists of two Kapton diaphragms with four piezoresistors arranged in Wheatstone bridge arrangement. The applied acoustic pressure causes diaphragm deflection and stress in diaphragm hinge, which is sensed by the piezoresistors positioned on the diaphragm. The piezoresistive material such as carbon or graphene is deposited at maximum stress area. Furthermore, the Wheatstone bridge arrangement has been formed to sense the change in resistance resulting into imbalanced bridge and two cantilever structures add directional properties to the acoustic sensor. The structure is designed, fabricated and tested and the dimensions of the structure are chosen to enable ease of fabrication without clean room facilities. This structure is tested with static and dynamic calibration for variation in resistance leading to bridge output voltage variation and directional properties.

This paper provides the experimental results that indicate sensor output variation in terms of a Wheatstone bridge output voltage from 0.45 V to 1.618 V for a variation in pressure from 0.59 mbar to 100 mbar. The device is also tested for directionality using vibration source and was found to respond as per the design.

The fabricated devices could not be tested for practical acoustic sources due to lack of facilities. They have been tested for a vibration source in place of acoustic source.

The piezoresistive bidirectional sensor can be used for detection of direction of the sound source.

In defense applications, it is important to detect the direction of the acoustic signal. This sensor is suited for such applications.

The present paper discusses a novel yet simple design of a cantilever beam-based bidirectional acoustic pressure sensor. This sensor fabrication does not require sophisticated cleanroom for fabrication and characterization facility for testing. The fabricated device has good repeatability and is able to detect the direction of the acoustic source in external environment.

Vision, audition, olfactory, tactile and taste are five important senses that human uses to interact with the real world. As facing more and more complex environments, a sensing system is essential for intelligent robots with various types of sensors. To mimic human-like abilities, sensors similar to human perception capabilities are indispensable. However, most research only concentrated on analyzing literature on single-modal sensors and their robotics application.

This study presents a systematic review of five bioinspired senses, especially considering a brief introduction of multimodal sensing applications and predicting current trends and future directions of this field, which may have continuous enlightenments.

This review shows that bioinspired sensors can enable robots to better understand the environment, and multiple sensor combinations can support the robot’s ability to behave intelligently.

The review starts with a brief survey of the biological sensing mechanisms of the five senses, which are followed by their bioinspired electronic counterparts. Their applications in the robots are then reviewed as another emphasis, covering the main application scopes of localization and navigation, objection identification, dexterous manipulation, compliant interaction and so on. Finally, the trends, difficulties and challenges of this research were discussed to help guide future research on intelligent robot sensors.

The purpose of this study is to develop a protective coating system on mild steel panel incorporating epoxidized natural rubber with acrylic polyol resin.

In this work, a novel attempt is made to develop binder coatings using epoxidized natural rubber-based material and an organic resin (acrylic resin) for corrosion protection on metal substrate. Seven different samples of multifunctional coatings are developed by varying the compositions of epoxidized natural rubber (ENR) and acrylic resin. The properties of the developed coatings have been characterized using analytical methods such as Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS). EIS has been carried out for 30 days to evaluate the corrosion resistance after immersing into 3.5 wt.% of sodium chloride. Cross hatch cut tester (CHT) has been used to study the adhesive properties. UV–Visible Spectroscopy (UV–Vis) was also used to assess changes in the coating-film transparency of the natural rubber-based coating systems in this study.

The developed coatings have formed uniform layer on the substrate. CHT results show excellent adhesion of the coatings. Higher concentrations of ENR have higher transparency level, which reduces when the acrylic concentration increases. FTIR analysis confirms the crosslinking that occurred between the components of the coatings. Based on the impedance data from EIS, the incorporation of natural rubber can be an additive for the corrosion protection, which has the coating resistance values well above 108Ω even after 30 days of immersion.

The blending method provides a simple and practical solution to improve the strength and adhesion properties of acrylic polyol resin with epoxidized natural rubber. There is still improvement needed for long-term applications.

The work has been conducted in our laboratory. The combination of natural rubber-based materials and organic resins is a new approach in coating research.

At the moment, in terms of both research and commercial products, smart shoe technology and applications seem not to attract the same magnitude of attention compared to smart garments and other smart wearables such as wrist watches and wrist bands. The purpose of this study is to fill this knowledge gap by discussing issues regarding smart shoe sensing technologies, smart shoe sensor placements, factors that affect sensor placements and finally the areas of smart shoe applications.

Through a review of relevant literature, this study first and foremost attempts to explain what constitutes a smart shoe and subsequently discusses the current trends in smart shoe applications. Discussed in this study are relevant sensing technologies, sensor placement and areas of smart shoe applications.

This study outlined 13 important areas of smart shoe applications. It also uncovered that majority of smart shoe functionality are physical activity tracking, health rehabilitation and ambulation assistance for the blind. Also highlighted in this review are some of the bottlenecks of smart shoe development.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first comprehensive review paper focused on smart shoe applications, and therefore serves as an apt reference for researchers within the field of smart footwear.

Artificial fruit ripening is hazardous to mankind. In the recent past, artificial fruit ripening is increasing gradually due to its commercial benefits. To discriminate the type of fruit ripening involved at the vendors’ side, there is a great demand for on-sight ethylene detection in a nondestructive manner. Therefore, this study aims to deal with a comparison of various laboratory and portable methods developed so far with high-performance metrics to identify the ethylene detection at fruit ripening site.

This paper focuses on various types of technologies proposed up to date in ethylene detection, fabrication methods and signal conditioning circuits for ethylene detection in parts per million and parts per billion levels. The authors have already developed an infrared (IR) sensor to detect ethylene and also developed a lab-based setup belonging to the electrochemical sensing methods to detect ethylene for the fruit ripening application.

The authors have developed an electrochemical sensor based on multi-walled carbon nanotubes whose performance is relatively higher than the sensors that were previously reported in terms of material, sensitivity and selectivity. For identifying the best sensing technology for optimization of ethylene detection for fruit ripening discrimination process, authors have developed an IR-based ethylene sensor and also semiconducting metal-oxide ethylene sensor which are all compared with literature-based comparable parameters. This review paper mainly focuses on the potential possibilities for developing portable ethylene sensing devices for investigation applications.

The authors have elaborately discussed the new chemical and physical methods of ethylene detection and quantification from their own developed methods and also the key findings of the methods proposed by fellow researchers working on this field. The authors would like to declare that the extensive analysis carried out in this technical survey could be used for developing a cost-effective and high-performance portable ethylene sensing device for fruit ripening and discrimination applications.

The purpose of this paper is to conduct a comprehensive study on building, fire and evacuation, so as to effectively improve the efficiency of building fire evacuation and the management level of fire evacuation site. Make up for the difficulties of BIM technology in effectively connecting building information and fire data.

First, this paper establishes a fire model and an evacuation model based on BIM information. Then, the safety index (SI) is introduced as a comprehensive index, and the IRI is established by integrating the SI function to evaluate the safety of evacuation routes. Based on these two indices, the IRI-based fire evacuation model is established.

This study offers an Improved Risk Index (IRI)-based fire evacuation model, which may achieve effective evacuation in fire scenes. And the model is verified by taking the fire evacuation of a shopping center building as an example.

This paper proposes a fire evacuation principle based on IRI, so that the relevant personnel can comprehensively consider the fire factors and evacuation factors to achieve the optimization of building design, thereby improving the fire safety of buildings.

Gas insulated systems, such as gas insulated lines (GIL), use insulating gas, mostly sulfur hexalfluoride (SF₆), to enable a higher dielectric strength compared to e.g. air. However, under high voltage direct current conditions, charge accumulation and electric field stress may occur, which may lead to partial discharge or system failure. Therefore, numerical simulations are used to design the system and determine the electric field and charge distribution. Although the gas conduction shows a more complex current–voltage characteristic compared to solid insulation, the electric conductivity of the SF₆ gas is set as constant in most works. The purpose of this study is to investigate different approaches to address the conduction in the gas properly for numerical simulations.

In this work, two approaches are investigated to address the conduction in the insulating gas and are compared to each other. One method is an ion-drift-diffusion model, where the conduction in the gas is described by the ion motion in the SF₆ gas. However, this method is computationally expensive. Alternatively, a less complex approach is an electro-thermal model with the application of an electric conductivity model for the SF₆ gas. Measurements show that the electric conductivity in the SF₆ gas has a nonlinear dependency on temperature, electric field and gas pressure. From these measurements, an electric conductivity model was developed. Both methods are compared by simulation results, where different parameters and conditions are considered, to investigate the potential of the electric conductivity model as a computationally less expensive alternative.

The simulation results of both simulation approaches show similar results, proving the electric conductivity for the SF₆ gas as a valid alternative. Using the electro-thermal model approach with the application of the electric conductivity model enables a solution time up to six times faster compared to the ion-drift-diffusion model. The application of the model allows to examine the influence of different parameters such as temperature and gas pressure on the electric field distribution in the GIL, whereas the ion-drift-diffusion model enables to investigate the distribution of homo- and heteropolar charges in the insulation gas.

This work presents numerical simulation models for high voltage direct current GIL, where the conduction in the SF₆ gas is described more precisely compared to a definition of a constant electric conductivity value for the insulation gas. The electric conductivity model for the SF₆ gas allows for consideration of the current–voltage characteristics of the gas, is computationally less expensive compared to an ion-drift diffusion model and needs considerably less solution time.