Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT) is a private university located in&nbsp;Tamil Nadu, India. Founded in 1984, as Vellore Engineering College, the institution offers 20 undergraduate, 34 postgraduate, four integrated and four research programs. It has campuses in Vellore, Amravati, Bhopal and Chennai.

VIT is one of the top ranked private universities in India according to NIRF, THE and QS Rankings.&nbsp;Govt. of India has recognized&nbsp;VIT, Vellore as an&nbsp;Institution of Eminence. This has allowed VIT to take independent quality initiatives and move up in world ranking.

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VIT University

Department of Sensor and Biomedical Technology

This work reports on the fabrication of microbump structures on nickel (Ni) films by single-pulse, localized laser irradiation. Conditions for the reproducible formation of such microstructures have been identified in terms of laser-irradiation and film parameters after systematic studies involving a relevant parameter space. Ni films deposited by vacuum evaporation were found to be better suited for reproducible laser microstructuring because they lack the typical cracks and voids morphology of sputtered films. The continuous and smooth nature of the evaporated films facilitated a radially symmetric heat flow propagation upon laser irradiation, which then resulted in a complex combination of thermal expansion, deformation, and other processes leading to a high yield of microstructures. An improvement in the inductance and the quality factor of on-chip spiral inductors, incorporating such laser-microstructured ferromagnetic nickel thin films was observed, which demonstrates the potential of such a laser-based method for fabrication or fine tuning of various micro-/nano-electric/electronic sensor and other components and systems. © 2002-2012 IEEE.

School of Electronics Engineering

Vellore Campus

World University root node

IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology

Laser-Based Fabrication of Microstructures on Nickel Thin Films and Its Applications in On-Chip Thin Film Inductors

The cornea of the human eye is the main functional element for vision. The visual data information is transferred from all the layers of the cornea to the focal point of the retina. optical nerve acts as media between the cornea and brain. The image data sets are acquired from the confocal microscope, which improves the penetration depth in order to extract from all five layers. Two datasets are acquired from confocal endothelium image and pre-processed and analysed. The data set ‘1’consists of ‘2’ normal and ‘3’ abnormal images. And dataset ‘2’ consists of five abnormal images. The image is segmented for identifying the cell contours and boundary conditions of the cell. The contrast levels of the image are enhanced with histogram equalization. The high-frequency noise signal is curtailed with a gaussian filter. The image is further processed for identifying the dark objects using auto metric threshold method. The cell density, cell structure, Pleomorphism, Polymegathism, Elongation Factor (EF), Compactness Factor (CF), and Heywood Circularity Factor (HCF) has been meticulously estimated with Particle Filter (PF) approach for each endothelium cells. The estimated results are compared with the existing morphological operation 1(MO1), morphological operation 2 (MO2) and S-PSO (Snake Particle Swarm Optimization) Approaches. From the experiment, the proposed approach obtains satisfactory results in part of (average time inspection) is 18.49 m/s and Standard Deviation (SD) is 0.51 m/s per image is meticulously calculated. © School of Engineering, Taylor’s University

Journal of Engineering Science and Technology

Confocal corneal endothelium dystrophy’s analysis using particle filter

The cornea is the most sensitive biological membrane in the human eye which consists of five layers viz. epithelial, Bowman, stroma and Descemet's and endothelial membrane. Endothelial layer in the cornea is the most vulnerable membrane among all the five membranes. This layer is significant as it allows free flow of aqueous humor fluid inside and outside of the cornea. Fuch's dystrophy (FD), Advanced Fuch's dystrophy (AFD), Posterior Polymorphous Corneal Dystrophy (PPCD), and Iridocorneal Dystrophy (ICD) are the major dystrophy's that affects the endothelium layer directly. The cells are drastically decreased when the dystrophies affect the endothelium layer. Morphological operations (MO1 & MO2) are used to estimate the endothelium cell density. A novel hybrid algorithm (HA) using Confocal Microscopy (CM) images have been proposed to identify the mean value of unique cells, standard deviation, area, cell densities and its quantitative values for the endothelial layer. The median filter is used to eliminate the noise. The estimated MSE (Mean square error) and PSNR (Peak Signal to Noise ratio) represented the filtered image for further processing. Altogether Eight (8) confocal endothelial dystrophic and two (2) normal images were used for analysis. The results harvested with the HA are comparable with standard manual (SM) and conventional cell density approach. The average error differences of MO1 & MO2 and S-PSO (Snake Particle Swarm Optimization) to the HA is 12.14%, 20.46%, 9.73%, and 8.00% respectively. The average inspection time of HA is 61.48 ms with standard deviation (SD) of 1.59 ms. The proposed algorithm showed high accuracy with a very low processing time of 58.57 ms which is suitable for detection of the membrane at an early stage to diagnose any disease related to the endothelial layer. © School of Engineering, Taylor's University.

Confocal corneal endothelium dystrophy's analysis using a hybrid algorithm

Measurement of humidity is one of the most significant issues in various areas of applications such as an agriculture, automated system, instrumentation, climatology and GPS. In this paper, a cost effective thin film impedance type humidity sensor is proposed to detect the moisture content in the ambient environment. The ceramic material alumina is used as a substrate over which a thin film of zirconium dioxide is deposited by RF (Radio frequency) Sputtering at 13.5 MHz. An interdigitated pattern of aluminium electrode is coated over the active sensing layer by thermal evaporation technique. The parallel plates of electrode with active sensing material (ZrO2) as dielectric constitute the capacitive structure. When the sensor is exposed to the ambient air containing moisture, the impedance of the sensing material varies. As the electrical permittivity of the ambient air is a function of relative percent humidity, this sensor is used for measuring the relative humidity in the ambient air. To test the performance of this device, an acrylic chamber is developed to assure that the measurements are free from external effects. An artificial moisture environment is created by placing a humidifier inside the chamber along with the fabricated sensor. The output of the sensor is interfaced with labview data acquisition which continuously monitored the humidity level sensed by the sensor. The relative humidity sensitivity of the device at an operating frequency range of 100 kHz to 1 MHz is 2.226.The humidity hysteresis error of 2.01 % is observed from the device. The designed humidity sensor shows a fast sensing response and the results obtained are validated by comparing with the test results of DHT11. © 2020 IEEE.

International Conference on Emerging Trends in Information Technology and Engineering, ic-ETITE 2020

Design and Development of Thin film Humidity Sensor based on Alumina and Zirconium dioxide

The basic vital parameters of the Human body can be detected from Plethysmography. The PPG signal helps in determining the heart rate of the person, along with SPo2,Blood Pressure and Blood Glucose. Through this monitoring system the doctors could identify the health status of the patient. In this paper, we have used Cloud computing technology in order to monitor the patient and retrieve the data by Alexa which has been connected to it. Considering the cloud computing technology, we have used AWS cloud for the storage of the PPG signal and also for running the algorithm inside the cloud. The smart watch (wearable) is used to collect the PPG data. This could be passed over the cloud for determining the heart rate and the parameter are retrieved with the help of Alexa. Here the Alexa also involved in giving the alert in case of abnormal ranges. © 2020 IEEE.

Proceedings of the 2020 IEEE International Conference on Communication and Signal Processing, ICCSP 2020

Detection of Vital Parameters using Cloud Computing Technology

Fulltext

Longhua Chinese Medicine

A Narrative review of scientific validation of gold- and silver-based Indian medicines and their future scope

Solid-state electronic devices based on biomolecules as current carrying elements have numerous applications from diagnostics to therapeutics. Casein micelle based solid-state device through metal-protein-metal electrical junctions designed for elucidating protein-drug interaction as well as proof-of-concept theranostics are the highlights of this proposed work. This biocompatible electronic platform has multifunctionality, transducing interactions between protein-drug and drug-analyte into electrical signals providing a sophisticated interface between nanoelectronics and biological information processing systems. Casein's pH-responsive behavior and its interaction with the drug cysteamine were realized through current–voltage (I-V) technique, using this multifunctional biosensing platform. Moreover, successful elucidation of interaction between the drug cysteamine and analyte cysteine on an electronic platform, led to the realization of proof-of-concept theranostics. Further, investigation of the piezoelectric response of casein-BT film renders prospects in self-powered application; demonstrated by means of piezoelectric nanogenerator (PNG). The developed sensing platform opens up possibilities to investigate the potential interactions and application in theranostics before commensing clinical trials. © 2019 Elsevier B.V.

Sensors and Actuators, B: Chemical

Biocompatible electronic platform for monitoring protein-drug interactions with potential in future theranostics

In today's life, people are aware of the fact that global warming and energy crisis are the major issues that are degrading the environment and reducing the life span of everyone due to the careless usage of the resources. We tend to spend more time to waste the reliable energy rather than utilizing them efficiently. So we hereby propose a triboelectric nanogenerator based model that can scavenge this energy from various forms mainly physical motion which would further be converted to electrical energy.Flappy Tappy (FT-TENG) based device converts energy generated from physical motion to electrical energy by the coupled effect of triboelectric and electrostatic induction where it acts as a battery-free sensor. This energy can further be utilized for self-powered applications. To analyze the energy harvesting performances of the FT-TENG, various tests have been demonstrated.The maximum output voltage and the short circuit current obtained were ~30V and ~1.5µA respectively. Furthermore, this device exhibits long term stability, durability and it's reliable. This device has a capacity to light up 100 LEDs. © 2020 American Institute of Physics Inc.. All rights reserved.

AIP Conference Proceedings

Biomechanical energy harvesting triboelectric nanogenerator as a self powered sensor

A highly reliable transitional flow-based integrated self-powered catechol sensor (SPCS) proposed for the detection of organic contaminants in water samples. Here the cost-effective hollow tube-shaped piezoelectric nanogenerator (TFPNG-SPCS) by the BiFeO3 nanoparticles works as an SPCS. The obtained ferroelectric remnant polarization and coercive voltages are 0.089 μC/cm2 and 223 V at 1 Hz frequency. The TFPNG device delivers an instantaneous peak-to-peak power density of 2.624 mW/m2 at 500 MΩ. The classification between physical and chemical stimuli is possible through in-tunnel transitional flow and converts them into a readable electrical signal. The proposed TFPNG-SPCS sensor has good selectivity, reasonable sensitivity, eco-friendly, and detection limits down to 10.2 μM, having a linear relationship with catechol concentrations. © 2020 Elsevier B.V.

All in one transitional flow-based integrated self-powered catechol sensor using BiFeO3 nanoparticles

BACKGROUND: Research focusses on providing economical and effective tactile readers which incorporate relative motion between the fingertip and the reading text. OBJECTIVE: Here, a novel design and prototype of a tactile reader is proposed for blind Braille and non-Braille users based on the sequential reading of text when using a single cell reader. METHODS: The accuracy of reading words using this design was evaluated on 17 visually challenged users who know Braille. With a slight modification in the design to benefit non-braille users, the reading of words on 10 blind-folded sighted individuals and 12 late-blind visually challenged users was investigated. Differences in recognition of English letters formed by dots and lines were explored. RESULTS: The results showed no significant difference in accuracy when reading words with this prototype compared to braille reading on paper. The percentage accuracy in reading words for the 39 users was 98.62% for blind braille readers, 90% for blindfolded sighted users and 96.8% for blind non-braille users. CONCLUSION: The findings indicate that the proposed design for tactile reading can potentially benefit both groups of visually challenged users-those who know braille and those who do not. © 2019-IOS Press and the authors. All rights reserved.