This paper investigates the mechanical behaviour of a system consisting of two coupled impacting unimorph piezoelectric cantilever beams, where the whole system is subjected to a harmonic base excitation, for energy harvesting. The system is modelled as in-extensional beams with Euler-Bernoulli beam theory. The curvature term is assumed to be nonlinear due to large amplitude vibrations. The governing equations of motion are derived using the Euler-Lagrange equations. The reduced-order model equations (ROMs) are obtained based on the Galerkin method. A parametric study is performed to reveal the influence of different parameters such as clearance between beams, coupling spring constant, damping ratio and external resistance load on the scavenged power from the nonlinear energy harvester. It is shown that the power generated by the coupled impact system due to nonlinear vibrations is sensitive to the thickness ratio of the beams and piezoelectric layers, and the clearance between the beams. In addition, the effect of the external resistance load on the average power is discussed for three types of systems: 1) a system which consists of two beams without impact, 2) a system which consists of two beams with impact, and 3) a system which consists of a single beam. The optimum value of the resistance load is obtained for each system, and it is shown that higher power is harvested by a system consisting of two beams with impact than other two systems.

A great progress has been made, since 2000, in the field of electrospinning (ES). ES has been turned out to be the most reliable, simple and cheap technique for the fabrication of nanofibers. The other aspect, associated with ES, is control over certain characteristic features of the nanofibers during the fabrication of nanofibers. Thousands of research studies have been conducted by using both natural and synthetic polymers. ES provides wide options for loading bioactive compounds into the polymers. Plant extracts are reservoir of such bioactive compounds with potential biomedical applications. This review is aimed to provide a brief overview of some recent research work in which plant crude extracts have been loaded with other natural or synthetic polymers for antibacterial and wound healing applications.

Sensors have been widely used in various data acquisition systems, especially for medical applications. However, once developed for wearable use, these have suffered from various types of noise which greatly degrade data quality and consequently, the reliability. Low data quality is a major obstacle for computer-based diagnosis. Thus, the noise tolerance ability plays a crucial role in wearable sensor based data acquisition and analysis. This work proposes a novel method: noise-invariant component analysis (N-ICA), to expose the influence of noise on this data and provides noise removal and dimensionality reduction. The proposed N-ICA based approach extracts information from data which undergoes minimal change with noise and directly shows the extent to which the true information has been corrupted by noise. This work also implements a simulated wearable sensor based ECG automatic diagnosis system together with a noise generator to validate N-ICA noise tolerant enhancement. Test data is selected from the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database. The simulated ECG monitoring system achieves 99.42% accuracy in classifying eight types of heartbeats. Experimental results demonstrate that the signal-to-noise ratio is improved by applying N-ICA based on ECG data contaminated by five noise sources. QRS detection accuracy is also improved to above 95% under the highest noise level tested. Dimensionality reduction reduces the data to 6.5% of the original size. Finally, diagnostic accuracy of four different classifiers is significantly improved when applied in our simulated ECG automatic monitoring system.

The article considers algorithms and methods for constructing decision support systems for forecasting and controlling the effectiveness of living systems management, to ensure the effectiveness of therapeutic procedures (ETP). ETP control is implemented in three stages. At the first stage, surrogate markers are selected, through the monitoring of which a decision is made on ETP. At the second stage, a distributed database is created, which allows the creation of surrogate markers intended for ETP monitoring. At the third stage, a meta analysis of the information collected in the distributed database on surrogate markers is made, which results in a decision on the ETP.

A web service is presented in which surrogate markers are selected based on analysis of intercellular relationships of peripheral blood smears. Algorithmic support of the web service and the structure of its software modules are given. The functional interaction of the developed software modules and the structure of the module for monitoring the dynamics of intercellular relations providing a meta-analysis of the effectiveness of drug prescriptions are described.

To ensure the functioning of the module for the analysis of the dynamics of intercellular relationships in the process of medicinal prescriptions, appropriate procedures for the analysis and classification of images of peripheral blood smears have been developed.

Elder men and women are at high risk of falling due to loss of coordination, poor vision, or weak bone structure. The fall can result in sustaining immobilizing fracture. The hypothesis examined in this paper is that fracture can be directly related to bone density alteration in the elderly. To assess the risk and provide understanding for working towards fracture preventive measures, an understanding of the magnitude of stresses and strains and their distribution in anatomical geometric locations in the femur are critical.

Finite element software, ANSYS, was used to predict the stress, strains, and fracture possibility in the neck of a 445-mm long femur bone, and 14.5-mm canal diameter due to sideward fall. Different bone densities are studied representing healthy to poor density conditions.

This study serves to answer the hypothesis as to whether bone density loss had a direct adverse correlation to fracture during a fall event in the elderly. Such findings provide potential future preventive measures for designing devises that can be worn by elderly at risk of fracture in a fall event due to poor bone density. This study introduces a first step in answering the question addressing the correlation of fracture and bone density.