Diagnosing and monitoring diseases and health often requires detecting and measuring concentrations of one or more analytes in a patient. Frequent trips to a healthcare facility are onerous and expensive and at home testing is painful, sometimes laborious and time consuming. All of this may lead to a lack of regular testing, and could mean missed diagnoses...

The market for point of care test strips demands high quality tests and low production costs without sacrificing sensitivity and specificity. Highly-ordered nanomaterials are being investigated as a viable approach for meeting these demands. Highly-ordered nanomaterials are ideal as they are inexpensive to manufacture and have been shown to produce...

Chronic stress has been widely implicated in a plethora of lethal and life-altering diseases including diabetes, heart attacks, depression, Alzheimer's and osteoporosis. Thus, there is great interest in monitoring stress levels in the population. Stress has both biochemical and physiological effects on the body that can be quantified in bodily fluids....

Congenital limb defects or loss of a limb through an accident can severely impede an individual’s mobility and ability to carry out day-to-day tasks. Artificial limbs, or prosthetics, are intended to restore a degree of normal function to amputees or individuals with congenital limb defects. Because of variations in sizes and shapes of individuals...

Use of current designs of lower limb prosthetic sockets result in many user issues ranging from pain and discomfort to tissue degeneration, thereby leading to lower levels of patient compliance. Common socket designs, including pin-lock and suction-based designs, utilize a solid outer shell that provides high levels of force distribution over the residual...

Pressure/force sensors and transducers have wide utility in mechanical, medical and industrial applications, with each industry striving for increased performance. Three key features determine how successful a pressure sensor may be: sensitivity, durability, and cost. Because of their robust and inexpensive nature, transformative electrochemical pressure/force...

Over 600,000 cardiovascular stents are implanted each year and about 2-3% of those will fail within six months of surgery. Signs of stent failure can range from no symptoms at all to typical heart attack type symptoms. Restenosis and thrombosis are the most common culprits for stent failure. While the percent of stent failures is relatively low, the...

Adolescent Idiopathic Scoliosis (AIS), a condition which causes the spine to curve sideways, affects as many as 4 in 100 adolescents, according to the Scoliosis Research Society. The most common treatment of this condition is surgery, with positive outcomes correlating with greater technique and experience of the surgeon. There are about 29,000 AIS...

Respiratory rate is an important vital sign used to monitor a person’s status and health progression. It is better than pulse measurements and blood pressure at discriminating between stable patients and at risk patients. Current contact-based technologies to measure respiratory rate are bulky and uncomfortable to wear, impacting their usefulness...

There are approximately two million people, in the US alone, suffering from limb loss and another 185,000 new limb loss cases each year. Upper limb prosthetics are typically categorized into body-powered and electric style systems. Body-powered systems lack feedback, cannot provide high force output and can be fatiguing. Electric systems are expensive,...