A Continuous Non-Invasive Blood Pressure Prediction Method Based on Deep Sparse Residual U-Net Combined with Improved Squeeze and Excitation Skip Connections.

Arterial blood pressure (ABP) serves as a pivotal clinical metric in cardiovascular health assessments, with the precise forecasting of continuous blood pressure assuming a critical role in both preventing and treating cardiovascular diseases. This study proposes a novel continuous non-invasive blood pressure prediction model, DSRUnet, based on deep sparse residual U-net combined with improved SE skip connections, which aim to enhance the accuracy of using photoplethysmography (PPG) signals for continuous blood pressure prediction. The model first introduces a sparse residual connection approach for path contraction and expansion, facilitating richer information fusion and feature expansion to better capture subtle variations in the original PPG signals, thereby enhancing the network's representational capacity and predictive performance and mitigating potential degradation in the network performance. Furthermore, an enhanced SE-GRU module was embedded in the skip connections to model and weight global information using an attention mechanism, capturing the temporal features of the PPG pulse signals through GRU layers to improve the quality of the transferred feature information and reduce redundant feature learning. Finally, a deep supervision mechanism was incorporated into the decoder module to guide the lower-level network to learn effective feature representations, alleviating the problem of gradient vanishing and facilitating effective training of the network. The proposed DSRUnet model was trained and tested on the publicly available UCI-BP dataset, with the average absolute errors for predicting systolic blood pressure (SBP), diastolic blood pressure (DBP), and mean blood pressure (MBP) being 3.36 ± 6.61 mmHg, 2.35 ± 4.54 mmHg, and 2.21 ± 4.36 mmHg, respectively, meeting the standards set by the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI), and achieving Grade A according to the British Hypertension Society (BHS) Standard for SBP and DBP predictions. Through ablation experiments and comparisons with other state-of-the-art methods, the effectiveness of DSRUnet in blood pressure prediction tasks, particularly for SBP, which generally yields poor prediction results, was significantly higher. The experimental results demonstrate that the DSRUnet model can accurately utilize PPG signals for real-time continuous blood pressure prediction and obtain high-quality and high-precision blood pressure prediction waveforms. Due to its non-invasiveness, continuity, and clinical relevance, the model may have significant implications for clinical applications in hospitals and research on wearable devices in daily life.

Graphene doping to enhance the mechanical energy conversion performances of GR/KNN/P(VDF-TrFE) flexible piezoelectric sensors.

Flexible piezoelectric composite, combining high piezoelectricity of filler and flexibility of polymer, provides a new research idea for developing flexible piezoelectric sensors (FPSs) with high piezoelectric output performance. FPSs based on GR/KNN/P(VDF-TrFE) three-phase composites are fabricated via doping a mass fraction of 15 wt% potassium sodium niobate (KNN) ceramic powder and various contents of graphene (GR) nanosheets into a P(VDF-TrFE) matrix. We find that an appropriate amount of GR is responsible for the enhanced crystallinity and ß-phase of P(VDF-TrFE). When the GR content is 0.15 wt%, the three-phase composite film exhibits a dielectric constant (εr) of 20.9 and a quasi-static piezoelectric constant (d33) of -28.4 pC N-1. Under three different test scenarios of a ball drop experiment, a surface of the mouse wheel, and an action of 2.5 MPa external stress, this GR/KNN/P(VDF-TrFE)-based FPS shows high piezoelectric output voltages of 7.4 V, ∼2.0 V, and 15.4 V, respectively. Moreover, the FPS retains its performance even after an extended period of cantilever vibration cycles (2200). Thus, the conductive filler GR is responsible for promoting the energy conversion performance of the piezoelectric polymer, which also provides an application candidate of this GR/KNN/P(VDF-TrFE) film in FPSs.

Hibiscus Leachate Dye-Based Low-Cost and Flexible Dye-Sensitized Solar Cell Prepared by Screen Printing.

Although the price of dye-sensitized solar cells is lower than other solar cells, they still contain some high-cost materials, such as transparent conductive substrates, dyes (ruthenium dyes, organic dyes, etc.), and platinum counter electrodes. To solve this problem, a dye-sensitized solar cell based on hibiscus leaching solution and carbon black-silver electrodes was prepared by screen printing. The prepared low-cost dye-sensitized solar cells were flexible. The open-circuit voltage (Voc) of the obtained dye-sensitized solar cell is 0.65 V, the current density (Jsc) is 90 µA/cm², and the fill factor (FF) is 0.241.

Superhydrophobic cotton fabric membrane prepared by fluoropolymers and modified nano-SiO2 used for oil/water separation.

At present, the preparation methods of oil-water separation membranes include chemical vapor deposition, electrospinning, atom transfer radical polymerization, etc. Basically, they all have issues of low recycling rate and incontinuous use. In this paper, the epoxy polymer P(GMA-r-MMA) obtained by traditional radical polymerization of glycidyl methacrylate (GMA) monomer and methacrylic acid (MMA) monomer, and pentafluoropropionic acid (PFPA) is used to modify polymer P(GMA-r-MMA) to obtain fluorine-containing epoxy polymer P(GMA-r-MMA)-g-PFPA. Secondly, fluorine-containing epoxy polymer P(GMA-r-MMA)-g-PFPA and amino-modified nano SiO2 is blended, and the cotton fabric is dip-coated to obtain a superhydrophobic surface, thereby preparing an oil-water separation membrane. By controlling the solution concentration, dipping time, drying time and other conditions, the superhydrophobic performance of the separation membrane was characterized, and the best construction conditions for the superhydrophobic surface were obtained: 0.3 mg mL-1 polymer concentration, immersion time 6 h, drying temperature 120°, and drying time 4 h, and the maximum water contact angle can reach to 150° ± 2°. Finally, the cotton fabric was modified under the best dipping conditions, and used as an oil-water separation membrane to study the oil-water separation performance of n-hexane, n-octane, kerosene, chloroform and water mixtures in batch operation and continuous operation. In batch operations, the separation efficiency can reach 99% and can achieve 5 consecutive high-efficiency separations without intermittent drying. In continuous flow operation, oil-water separation can last for more than 12 hours and the separation efficiency can reach 98%. It also has stable oil-water separation performance for oil-water emulsion.

Enhanced piezoelectric and acoustic performances of poly(vinylidene fluoride-trifluoroethylene) films for hydroacoustic applications.

Concerning the study of flexible piezoelectric devices, both scholars and engineers propose that poly(vinylidene fluoride-trifluoroethylene) (P(VDF-TrFE)) shows more merits than oriented polyvinylidene fluoride (OPVDF) in terms of dielectric, piezoelectric, mechanic-electric, acoustic emission reception performances, etc. Thus, in this study, to clarify the differences between the two types of polymers on their ferroelectric and piezoelectric behaviors, we systematically investigated samples to analyze their molecular structures and phase structures, and to compare their dielectric properties and acoustic emission reception performances. It was found that the wedge effect of TrFE, P(VDF-TrFE), possesses higher regular ß phase crystal grains, which are easier to order along the electric field and possess more ordered static charge distribution than that of OPVDF. Consequently, a considerable saturated electric polarization (Pm ∼ 15 µC cm-2 under 225 MV m-1), a large piezoelectric coefficient (d33 ∼ -21.5 pC N-1) and a low coercive electric field (Ec ∼ 50 MV m-1) were obtained in the P(VDF-TrFE) films. It is worth noting that P(VDF-TrFE) shows a more stable d33 piezoelectric response (up to 120 °C) than that of the OPVDF. Additionally, the P(VDF-TrFE) piezoelectric films exhibit a sensitive acoustic emission reception property at approximately 70 dB and an extensive response frequency range from 10 to 100 kHz. These combined properties demonstrate that P(VDF-TrFE) piezoelectric films are a promising material for flexible and easily shaped electronic devices, including hydroacoustic sensors, actuators, and energy transfer units.

The Dependence of Dielectric and Ferroelectric Properties on Crystal Phase Structures of the Hydrogenized P(VDF-TrFE) Films With Different Thermal Processing.

Different thermal treatments were used to obtain various crystal structures of hydrogenated poly(vinylidene fluoride-trifluoroethylene) [P(VDF-TrFE)] films synthesized by an atom transfer radical chain transfer and controllable elimination reaction route. After analyzing the results of X-ray diffraction and differential scanning calorimeter, we found that these P(VDF-TrFE) samples possessed mixed crystal phases of α , ß , and γ with various compositions depending on the TrFE content and processing temperature, and this characteristic was also demonstrated by the dielectric temperature curves. After polarizing the P(VDF-TrFE) samples at different electric fields, the effect of crystal structure on their ferroelectric and piezoelectric properties was illustrated and conformed by field emission scanning electronic microscopy morphology, which was found that large TrFE content and high temperature processing were responsible for the large remnant polarization. As a result, the annealed P(VDF-TrFE) 80/20 mol% possessed a high remnant polarization of [Formula: see text]/cm2, a large piezoelectric value ( d33 = -25 pC/N), and a favorable electromechanical coupling factor ( kt = 0.26 ), providing a reliable method for the structure design and sample fabrication of this kind of copolymer aimed at the applications in piezoelectric sensors and actuators.