Cell-Based Sensors and Cell-Based Actuators

The Propulsion Instrumentation Working Group - Introduction and discussion of subteam activities

Chapter 9 - Biodegradability, sustainability, and life cycle assessment of smart textiles

Smart textiles are emerging technologies with numerous applications and technical advantages. These are textiles which have undergone alteration in order to be utilized as sensors, actuators, and/or other types of transducers. Sensing and actuation features can be imparted to fabric substrates by applying intelligent coatings such that they will be sensitive and/or reactive to more than one type of stimulus, (e.g., chemical or physical). Smart coating polymers applied to fabrics include inherently conductive, semiconductive, and particle-doped polymers. These coatings can be piezoresistive, magnetoresistive, piezoelectric, photochromic, and sensitive to chemicals, gases, changes in humidity, and temperature, among others. In this chapter, an overview of the smart textile transducer elements, textile platforms, application techniques, and construction methods will be presented. Multiple applications have been inspired by the lightweight and compliant characteristics of smart textiles: industrial (i.e., uniforms), aerospace (i.e., space suit liners), military (i.e., soldier gear), and medical (i.e., patient garments), among others. These applications will define the current development of smart textile technologies and will be further discussed in this chapter. Furthermore, design principles and challenges associated to coating technologies as applied to textiles including surface treatment for strong adhesion, durability, and environmental/mechanical constraints are introduced. Future trends will arise from the integration of novel technologies into portable platforms with intelligent polymer coatings, alongside development of wearable technologies for fast input/data processing and streamlined user interfaces.

Smart materials are the materials which have the ability to respond to changes in their condition or the environment to which they are exposed, in a useful and usually repetitive manner. Structures that incorporate smart materials are called as “Smart Structures”. Smart materials are developed which responds to environmental stimuli such as pressure, temperature and wind. Smart materials used in construction technology includes self healing coatings, smart concrete, shape shifting metals, transparent metals, aerogels etc which will change the construction technology in near future. A new material known as shape shifting material has been developed that once deformed will automatically return to its original shape when heated. Concrete is the major building material used in construction industry but it is vulnerable and starts to collapse when it comes in contact with environmental stimuli such as water, wind, stress and pressure. A new type of smart concrete contains dormant bacteria and when they come into contact with stimuli like water, they create limestone, filling up the cracks and thus creating a self-healing repair mechanism. The coatings, made with polymers internally react with one another when ruptured, thus creating a self-healing mechanism. Transparent metals and aerogels are the futuristic materials which will replace the conventional building materials and will play a crucial role in the development of smart cities. Identifying the conventional moiety between Materials Science and construction technology, the paper intent to show how these two fields are inherently connected. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the types of smart materials for construction technology, giving a new vision into innovative processes and techniques, providing new inspiration in the field of architectural design and construction technology.

Smart Textiles Embedded with Optical Fibre Sensors for Health Monitoring of Patients

Advances in our scientific understanding and technological power in recent decades have dramatically amplified our capacity to intentionally manipulate complex ecological and biological systems. An implication of this is that biological and ecological problems are increasingly understood and approached from an engineering perspective. In environmental contexts, this is exemplified in the pursuits of geoengineering, designer ecosystems, and conservation cloning. In human health contexts, it is exemplified in the development of synthetic biology, bionanotechnology, and human enhancement technologies. Designer Biology: The Ethics of Intensively Engineering Biological and Ecological Systems consists of thirteen chapters (twelve of them original to the collection) that address the ethical issues raised by technological intervention and design across a broad range of biological and ecological systems. Among the technologies addressed are geoengineering, human enhancement, sex selection, genetic modification, and synthetic biology. This collection advances and enriches our understanding of the ethical issues raised by these technologies and identifies general lessons about the ethics of engineering complex biological and ecological systems that can be applied as new technologies and practices emerge. The insights that emerge will be especially valuable to students and scholars of environmental ethics, bioethics, or technology ethics.

Nanoparticles have gained tremendous potential as smart materials in various therapeutic strategies in biological and non-biological systems. Due to the small size (less than 100 nm), nanoparticles penetrate into even smaller capillaries, which are taken up within cells, allowing an efficient drug accumulation at the targeted sites in the body. The use of biodegradable materials for nanoparticle preparation allows sustained drug release at the targeted site over a period of days or even weeks after injection. Peptides, proteins, nanogels, and antisense drugs have been synthesized in an effort to combat central nervous system (CNS) diseases. Molecules such as dalargin and loperamide are loaded onto nanoparticlees with the aim to drug delivery. Nanoparticles such as pegylated-poly(hexadecylcyanoacrylate) (PEG-PHDCA) have been investigated for the treatment of several CNS diseases. Liposomes are synthetic and spherical molecules, consisting of single amphiphilic lipid bilayers, which can entrap therapeutic molecules, including drugs, vaccines, nucleic acids, and proteins. Solid lipid nanoparticles are spherical, stable nanocarriers that possess a solid hydrophobic lipid core matrix stabilized by aqueous surfactant. Micelle is utilized for the delivery of curcumin for targeting glioma and treating Alzheimer’s disease as a nanocarrier. Gold, silica, and carbon nanotubes/nanoparticles have been used to deliver specific drug across the blood-brain barrier. Gold nanoparticles functionalized with peptides are utilized for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and functionalized with L-DOPA have been reported for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease. Chemically functionalized multi-walled carbon nanotubes and polymer-coated carbon nanotubes have been applied for the delivery of drugs for brain cancer therapy. Various shapes such as nanosphere, nanostar, nanorods, and nanocage are utilized in brain tumor diagnosis. In the noninvasive approach, polymeric nanoparticles, especially PBCA nanoparticles coated with polysorbate 80, have recently received much attention from neuroscientists as an attractive and innovative carrier for brain targeting.

The effect that environmental stimuli will have on behavior is ordinarily a function of three properties of the stimuli: intensity, meaningfullness and variation (Fiske and Maddi, 1961). Research on physiological concomitants of arousal and emotional states have utilized a variety of stimuli to evoke pertinent reactions. One type frequently used consists of visual stimuli in which nude or seminude human figures are depicted in still photographs or movies. Several investigations have found differences in physiological response patterns between this type of pictorial stimulus and other types of pictorial emotional stimuli (Koegler and Kline, 1965; Davis, 1967; Davis and Buckwald, 1957; Lazarus et al, 1963; Lifshitz, 1966). Differences in magnitude of physiological response to varied types of visual sexual stimuli have been found in studies of deviant sexual orientation (Solyom and Beck, 1967; McConaghy, 1967; Freund et al, 1958; Hess et al, 1965). Levitt and Hinesley (1967) studied the valences of erotic visual stimuli in normal subjects, but without regard to physiological variables. Except for studies by Loiselle and Mollenauer (1965), Koegler and Kline (1965), and McConaghy (1967), there has been little attention given to different types of pictorial sexual stimuli and physiological response in normal individuals, nor to the author's knowledge, have relationships been investigated between physiological responses and the different possible emotional connotations or meanings that sexual visual stimuli may have for normal subjects, other than roughly classifying the stimuli as male or female, or as nude or semi-nude.

The term "smart materials" refers to a class of materials that have the ability to modify their properties in response to external inputs. Smart materials provide several desirable characteristics that make them highly appealing. These include their lightweight nature, sensing capabilities, reduced component size, and complexity. Furthermore, smart materials offer design freedom, enhanced usefulness, and increased reliability. A smart material is an entity that has the ability to undergo a change in its material properties and manifests a discernible and palpable response to external stimuli. The effective use of smart materials offers a degree of environmental resilience that is challenging to attain with conventional technologies, which are vulnerable to natural forces. The potential application of smart materials, such as shape-memory alloys and piezoelectricity, in the transportation sector represents a significant advancement in futuristic technology. The aforementioned modification renders smart materials increasingly crucial in several technological domains, particularly in the fields of health and information technology. Despite the extensive range of applications for smart materials, their increased reliance is hindered by several limitations that must be resolved in order to effectively utilise these materials. These limitations include issues related to system compatibility, availability, cost, fragility, diminished performance over time, challenges in integration, and potential toxicity concerns. The future prospects of smart materials are expected to be shaped by interdisciplinary collaborations among scientists spanning various fields, including electronic engineering, chemistry, and cell biology.

Smart textile behaviour encompasses changes over time, which are triggered upon a sensed stimulus. With a focus on dynamic qualities, this research sought to study how gradual and reversible transitions of smart textiles can be influenced by the activation variable – stimuli magnitude. Taking into account an analysis of different external stimuli for the same property change, the experimental work was conducted with Colour Change Materials, namely textiles screen printed with thermo, photo and hydrochromic pigments. The results attained demonstrate how stimuli magnitude can affect textile temporal expressions, in this case: hue, saturation and lightness, as well as pace change. In addition, different considerations also arose in respect to each stimulus’ energy type and interdependencies between stimuli types. Contributing to the understanding of dynamic qualities of smart textiles and chromic materials’ properties, this research also discusses further alternatives to explore textile behaviour towards new design possibilities for smart textiles as dynamic interfaces.

Engineering Rugged Field Assays to Detect Hazardous Chemicals Using Spore-Based Bacterial Biosensors.

In today's world, there is an ever growing need for lightweight, portable sensor systems to detect chemical toxicants and biological toxins. The challenges encountered with such detection systems are numerous, as there are a myriad of potential targets in various sample matrices that are often present at trace-level concentrations. At ERDC-CERL, the Lab-on-a-Chip (LoaC) group is working with a number of academic and small business collaborators to develop solutions to meet these challenges. This report will focus on recent advances in three distinct areas: (1) the development of a flexible platform to allow fieldable LoaC analyses of water samples, (2) cell-, organelle-, and synthetic biology-based toxicity sensors, and (3) nanofluidic/microfluidic interface (NMI) sample enrichment devices. To transition LoaC-based sensors from the laboratory bench to the field, a portable hardware system capable of operating a wide variety of microfluidic chip-based assays has been developed. As a demonstration of the versatility of this approach assays for the separation and quantitation of anionic contaminants (i.e., perchlorate), quantitation of heavy metals (Pb and Cd), and cell-based toxicity sensors have been developed and demonstrated. Sensors harboring living cells provide a rapid means of assessing water toxicity. Cell-based sensors exploit the sensitivity of a living cell to discrete changes in its environment to report the presence of toxicants. However, this sensitivity of cells to environmental changes also hinders their usability in nonlaboratory settings. Therefore, isolating intact organelles (i.e., mitochondria) offers a nonliving alternative that preserves the sensitivity of the living cells and allows the electrochemical reporting of the presence of a contaminant. Pursuing a synthetic biology approach has also allowed the development of nonliving reporting mechanisms that utilize engineered biological pathways for novel sensing and remediation applications. To help overcome the challenges associated with the detection of target species at trace-level concentrations, NMIs are being developed for the enrichment of charged species in solution. NMI concentrators can be classified as either electroosmotic flow or electrophoresis-dominant devices. Further advances in electrophoresis-dominant concentrators will aid in the analysis of samples that contain proteins and other substances prone to surface adsorption. These recent advances illustrate how LoaC systems provide a suitable platform for development of fieldable sensors to detect a broad range of chemical/biological pollutants and threats.

Three-dimensional (3D) bioprinting is a versatile technique for biomedical applications, and includes organ printing, 3D disease model development, and drug delivery. The bioprintable materials combined with live cells have been utilized as bioinks in 3D bioprinter to fabricate versatile 3D printed structures. The 3D structures developed with smart and responsive materials can change their dimension, a technique similar to self-assembly, unfolding a new branch termed as four-dimensional (4D) printing. This manuscript reviews the details of various bioprintable materials and 3D printers, the application of 3D printing in biomedicine, smart materials, and stimulations for 4D printing. Further, this article also summarizes the regulatory issues and the limitations involved with the bioprinting. The advancements in 3D and 4D printing technology have significantly contributed to the medical field, and adequate research and amalgamation of engineering and science ideas will strengthen the application of this technology and bring solution for the existing problems.Graphical abstract

4 - Design and manufacture of textile-based sensors

Smart clothing and body sensors for military use may not sell the same way smartphones do, but it’s still a growing market. Tractica forecasts that overall shipments of smart clothing will rise from 968,000 units in 2015 to 24.75 million units in 2021, a compound annual growth rate of nearly 72 percent. Smart clothing has become a key component in the creation of new military uniforms, designed to improve the health of the soldier while providing added battlefield insight. Smart military clothing is expected to be a $500 million market by next year. The military has partnered with industry leaders, other government agencies, and academia to support and advance the development of potential smart clothing solutions that would be beneficial to the U.S. military by giving them a technological and tactical advantage over its foes,” write the students of the University of California Berkley ’ s Sutardja Center in their analysis of the smart clothing market. Agent Detection is also known as environmental sensors, these sensors are designed to detect and avert dangers by measuring things such as radiation, chemicals, viruses, bacteria, fungi, humidity, temperature and atmospheric pressure. When working with smart clothing and body sensors, the challenge is to create a garment that can be treated like other clothing, being comfortable, flexible and washable. At the same time, many wearable systems are meant to be worn during rugged activity. Soldiers in the field need wearable clothing that can withstand a wide range of temperatures. This clothing also needs to provide effective shock and vibration resistance, as well as resistance to chemicals or solvents that might otherwise destroy a commercial device.