Scaled Jump in Gravity-Reduced Virtual Environments.

The reduced gravity experienced in lunar or Martian surfaces can be simulated on the earth using a cable-driven system, where the cable lifts a person to reduce his or her weight. This paper presents a novel cable-driven system designed for the purpose. It is integrated with a head-mounted display and a motion capture system. Focusing on jump motion within the system, this paper proposes to scale the jump and reports the experiments made for quantifying the extent to which a jump can be scaled without the discrepancy between physical and virtual jumps being noticed by the user. With the tolerable range of scaling computed from these experiments, an application named retargeted jump is developed, where a user can jump up onto virtual objects while physically jumping in the real-world flat floor. The core techniques presented in this paper can be extended to develop extreme-sport simulators such as parasailing and skydiving.

A microfluidic device for label-free detection of Escherichia coli in drinking water using positive dielectrophoretic focusing, capturing, and impedance measurement.

While sensors that allow for high-throughput enumeration of microorganisms within drinking water are useful for water quality monitoring, it is particularly challenging to accurately quantify microorganisms that are present in low numbers (<100 CFU/mL) in a high-throughput manner. Negative dielectrophoresis (nDEP) is typically utilized in DEP-based cell focusing methods; however, due to its low conductivity, drinking water cannot be analyzed by this approach. Here, we report a positive DEP (pDEP)-based Escherichia coli detection system that is integrated with a focusing and sensing electrode. By incorporating a passivation layer, we avoided issues with adhesion of E. coli to the electrode, and achieved efficient cell focusing under high flow rate conditions (1500 µL/h). The resulting focused E. coli cells were then trapped on the sensor electrode, resulting in changes in impedance. The proposed system was evaluated using four different E. coli populations (150-1500 CFU/mL). We successfully enumerated populations as low as 300 CFU/mL within 1 min, and the signal variation was 1.13±0.37%. The device introduced in this study provides the basis for the development of portable, highly sensitive microorganism sensors that enable rapid detection of bacteria in drinking water.

Improvement of electrical blood hematocrit measurements under various plasma conditions using a novel hematocrit estimation parameter.

This paper presents an electrical method for measurement of Hematocrit (HCT) using a novel HCT estimation parameter. Particularly in the case of electrical HCT measurements, the measurement error generally increases with changes in the electrical conditions of the plasma such as conductivity and osmolality. This is because the electrical properties of blood are a function not only of HCT, but also of the electrical conditions in the plasma. In an attempt to reduce the measurement errors, we herein propose a novel HCT estimation parameter reflecting the characteristics of both the changes in volume of red blood cells (RBCs) and electrical conditions of plasma, simultaneously. In order to characterize the proposed methods under various electrical conditions of plasma, we prepared twelve blood samples such as four kinds of plasma conditions (hypotonic, isotonic, two kinds of hypertonic conditions) at three different HCT levels. Using linear regression analysis, we confirmed that the proposed parameter was highly correlated with reference HCT (HCT(ref.)) values measured by microcentrifugation. Thus, the HCT measurement error was less than 4%, despite considerable variations in the conductivity and osmolality of the plasma at conditions of the HCT(ref.) of 20%. Multiple linear regression analysis showed that the proposed HCT estimation parameter also yielded a lower measurement error (1%) than the other parameter previously used for the same purpose. Thus, these preliminary results suggest that proposed method could be used for accurate, fast, easy, and reproducible HCT measurements in medical procedures.

A microfluidic device for continuous white blood cell separation and lysis from whole blood.

A microfluidic device, which is composed of a blood inlet, a cell lysis solution inlet, a bifurcation outlet containing six microchannels, and a white blood cell (WBC)-lysed solution outlet, is proposed in this study to separate WBCs from whole blood and lyse the WBCs in a continuous and near real-time fashion. The geometry of the microfluidic device is determined based on the bifurcation law and a cell crossover method. The microflow patterns of blood cells in the microfluidic channels are simulated by computational fluid dynamics. The simulation results agree with the experiment results by considering the reduction of blood viscosity in the microfluidic channels. The performance of the microfluidic device is evaluated by investigating the WBC recovery efficiency and the ratio of spectrophotometric absorbance of the blood sample at 260 to that at 280nm. The WBC recovery efficiency at the main channel outlet is 97.2%. The measured spectrophotometric absorbance ratio of 1.82 indicates that the separated WBCs are completely lysed, leaving only pure DNA in the WBC-lysed solution. The continuous cell separation and lysis is completed within only 0.5s. Therefore, it is concluded that the proposed microfluidic device is promising for separating WBCs from whole blood without any pretreatment and lysing the WBCs in a continuous and near real-time fashion. The proposed microfluidic device may be applicable to a lab-on-a-chip for blood analysis.