A 15-cantilever-type force-sensor unit is presented for the measurement of palatolingual contact stress and pattern during palatal consonant phonation. The force sensor unit is composed of a strain gauge and a cantilever, and is embedded in a thin palatal plate attached to the human hard palate. It is 3 mm wide, by 5 mm long, and 1.3 mm thick. The output of the force sensor unit at the low stre...

In voltage-gated potassium (Kv) channels membrane depolarization causes movement of a voltage sensor domain. This conformational change of the protein is transmitted to the pore domain and eventually leads to pore opening. However, the voltage sensor domain may interact with two distinct gates in the pore domain: the activation gate (A-gate), involving the cytoplasmic S6 bundle crossing, and th...

Embedded sensor network is a system of nodes, each equipped with a certain amount of sensing, actuating, computation, communication, and storage resources. One of the key prerequisites for effective and efficient embedded sensor systems is development of low cost, low overhead, high resilient fault-tolerance techniques. Cost sensitivity implies that traditional double and triple redundancies ar...

The feasibility of detecting small molecules such as pesticides using optical evanescent-wave sensors is discussed with emphasis on the Mach-Zehnder sensor and a newly developed sensor called a ‘critical’ sensor. For direct detection of an estimated average pesticide layer growth of 2X 10m4 nm, the sensitivity of the Mach-Zehnder sensor is almost adequate (lx lo-” nm within one hour), whereas t...

A new planar waveguide immunosensor has been developed in which adsorption at a surface, changing the refractive index contrast, is measured. In this "critical" sensor the change in the effective refractive index contrast is transducted to a shift of the critical reflection angle. The sensor's response after a specific binding of antigens to antibodies is discussed theoretically. In addition, a...

Considering tactile sensors there are two ways to acquire object information. These are spatial sensing with two dimensional devices and fast sensing with simple devices. Because the reflection-type tactile sensor uses a reflection image, both methods can be employed. Though there exist some dynamic characteristics in these two ways. In this study, we first validate the hysteresis of the reflec...

wireless sensor networks (wsns) consist of a large number of sensor nodes which are capable of sensing different environmental phenomena and sending the collected data to the base station or sink. since sensor nodes are made of cheap components and are deployed in remote and uncontrolled environments, they are prone to failure; thus, maintaining a network with its proper functions even when und...

this paper presents an optimal integrated instrumentation sensor network design methodology for complex nonlinear chemical process plants using a combinatorial particle swarm optimiazation (cpso) engine. no comprehensive sensor network design approach has been addressed yet in the literature to simultaneously incorporate cost, precision and reliability requirements for nonlinear plants. the pre...