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Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    PhysioSkin: Rapid Fabrication of Skin-Conformal Physiological Interfaces
    (New York,NY,United States : Association for Computing Machinery, 2020) Nittala, Aditya Shekhar; Khan, Arshad; Kruttwig, Klaus; Kraus, Tobias; Steimle, Jürgen; Bernhaupt, Regina
    Advances in rapid prototyping platforms have made physiological sensing accessible to a wide audience. However, off-the-shelf electrodes commonly used for capturing biosignals are typically thick, non-conformal and do not support customization. We present PhysioSkin, a rapid, do-it-yourself prototyping method for fabricating custom multi-modal physiological sensors, using commercial materials and a commodity desktop inkjet printer. It realizes ultrathin skin-conformal patches (~1μm) and interactive textiles that capture sEMG, EDA and ECG signals. It further supports fabricating devices with custom levels of thickness and stretchability. We present detailed fabrication explorations on multiple substrate materials, functional inks and skin adhesive materials. Informed from the literature, we also provide design recommendations for each of the modalities. Evaluation results show that the sensor patches achieve a high signal-to-noise ratio. Example applications demonstrate the functionality and versatility of our approach for prototyping a next generation of physiological devices that intimately couple with the human body.
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    Soft Inkjet Circuits: Rapid Multi-Material Fabrication of Soft Circuits using a Commodity Inkjet Printer
    (New York City : Association for Computing Machinery, 2019) Khan, Arshad; Roo, Joan Sol; Kraus, Tobias; Steimle, Jürgen
    Despite the increasing popularity of soft interactive devices, their fabrication remains complex and time consuming. We contribute a process for rapid do-it-yourself fabrication of soft circuits using a conventional desktop inkjet printer. It supports inkjet printing of circuits that are stretchable, ultrathin, high resolution, and integrated with a wide variety of materials used for prototyping. We introduce multi-ink functional printing on a desktop printer for realizing multi-material devices, including conductive and isolating inks. We further present DIY techniques to enhance compatibility between inks and substrates and the circuits' elasticity. This enables circuits on a wide set of materials including temporary tattoo paper, textiles, and thermoplastic. Four application cases demonstrate versatile uses for realizing stretchable devices, e-textiles, body-based and re-shapeable interfaces.
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    Computational design and optimization of electro-physiological sensors
    ([London] : Nature Publishing Group UK, 2021) Nittala, Aditya Shekhar; Karrenbauer, Andreas; Khan, Arshad; Kraus, Tobias; Steimle, Jürgen
    Electro-physiological sensing devices are becoming increasingly common in diverse applications. However, designing such sensors in compact form factors and for high-quality signal acquisition is a challenging task even for experts, is typically done using heuristics, and requires extensive training. Our work proposes a computational approach for designing multi-modal electro-physiological sensors. By employing an optimization-based approach alongside an integrated predictive model for multiple modalities, compact sensors can be created which offer an optimal trade-off between high signal quality and small device size. The task is assisted by a graphical tool that allows to easily specify design preferences and to visually analyze the generated designs in real-time, enabling designer-in-the-loop optimization. Experimental results show high quantitative agreement between the prediction of the optimizer and experimentally collected physiological data. They demonstrate that generated designs can achieve an optimal balance between the size of the sensor and its signal acquisition capability, outperforming expert generated solutions.