• Title/Summary/Keyword: environmental biosensors

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Physiological Data Monitoring of Physical Exertion of Construction Workers Using Exoskeleton in Varied Temperatures

  • Ibrahim, Abdullahi;Okpala, Ifeanyi;Nnaji, Chukwuma
    • International conference on construction engineering and project management
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    • 2022.06a
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    • pp.1242-1242
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    • 2022
  • Annually, several construction workers fall ill, are injured, or die due to heat-related exposure. The prevalence of work-related heat illness may rise and become an issue for workers operating in temperate climates, given the increase in frequency and intensity of heatwaves in the US. An increase in temperature negatively impacts physical exertion levels and mental state, thereby increasing the potential of accidents on the job site. To reduce the impact of heat stress on workers, it is critical to develop and implement measures for monitoring physical exertion levels and mental state in hot conditions. For this, limited studies have evaluated the utility of wearable biosensors in measuring physical exertion and mental workload in hot conditions. In addition, most studies focus solely on male participants, with little to no reference to female workers who may be exposed to greater heat stress risk. Therefore, this study aims to develop a process for objective and continuous assessment of worker physical exertion and mental workload using wearable biosensors. Physiological data were collected from eight (four male and four female) participants performing a simulated drilling task at 92oF and about 50% humidity level. After removing signal artifacts from the data using multiple filtering processes, the data was compared to a perceived muscle exertion scale and mental workload scale. Results indicate that biosensors' features can effectively detect the change in worker physical and mental state in hot conditions. Therefore, wearable biosensors provide a feasible and effective opportunity to continuously assess worker physical exertion and mental workload.

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Biochemical and Biodiversity Insights into Heavy Metal Ion-Responsive Transcription Regulators for Synthetic Biological Heavy Metal Sensors

  • Jung, Jaejoon;Lee, Sang Jun
    • Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
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    • v.29 no.10
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    • pp.1522-1542
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    • 2019
  • To adapt to environmental changes and to maintain cellular homeostasis, microorganisms adjust the intracellular concentrations of biochemical compounds, including metal ions; these are essential for the catalytic function of many enzymes in cells, but excessive amounts of essential metals and heavy metals cause cellular damage. Metal-responsive transcriptional regulators play pivotal roles in metal uptake, pumping out, sequestration, and oxidation or reduction to a less toxic status via regulating the expression of the detoxification-related genes. The sensory and regulatory functions of the metalloregulators have made them as attractive biological parts for synthetic biology, and the exceptional sensitivity and selectivity of metalloregulators toward metal ions have been used in heavy metal biosensors to cope with prevalent heavy metal contamination. Due to their importance, substantial efforts have been made to characterize heavy metal-responsive transcriptional regulators and to develop heavy metal-sensing biosensors. In this review, we summarize the biochemical data for the two major metalloregulator families, SmtB/ArsR and MerR, to describe their metal-binding sites, specific chelating chemistry, and conformational changes. Based on our understanding of the regulatory mechanisms, previously developed metal biosensors are examined to point out their limitations, such as high background noise and a lack of well-characterized biological parts. We discuss several strategies to improve the functionality of the metal biosensors, such as reducing the background noise and amplifying the output signal. From the perspective of making heavy metal biosensors, we suggest that the characterization of novel metalloregulators and the fabrication of exquisitely designed genetic circuits will be required.

Environmental Sensor Selection : classification and its applications

  • Rhee, In-Hyoung;Cho, Daechul
    • Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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    • v.5 no.1
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    • pp.87-92
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    • 2004
  • This review focuses on the developed and the being developed environmental sensors in particular biological sensors. As well as discussing the classification and some main principles, presenting current trend of the environmental sensors is given. Two main categories are immunosensors and catalytic sensors. In addition to those. DNA or RNA sensors or protein based sensors are discussed. Some crucial examples of the applications of such sensors are given to show how the sensor technology it used for environmental and biological monitoring, biomarkers of exposure.

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BIOSENSORS IN AGRICULTURAL AND BIOLOGICAL SYSTEMS (농업 및 생물계에서의 바이오 센서)

  • Delwiche, M.J.;Jenkins, D.M.;Tang, X.;Jackson, E.S.
    • Proceedings of the Korean Society for Agricultural Machinery Conference
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    • 2000.11a
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    • pp.76-100
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    • 2000
  • A brief general discussion of the nature and function of biosensors is presented. While the primary motivator for biosensor development has been the health-care industries, recent research efforts have spread to problems in agriculture and biological production systems. To illustrate some of the research from our laboratory, three example biosensors and their corresponding applications are presented. The first of these is an immunosensor for measurement of the hormone progesterone during milking as a method to improve reproductive management of dairy herds. The second example is an enzyme sensor for measurement of urea in milk as a menas to determine the efficiency of conversion of input protein to milk protein and, thus, improve nutritional management of dairy herds. The third example is a DNA sensor using polymerase chain reaction to detect pathogenic bacteria in the wash water of fresh and minimally processed fruits and vegetables. The potential for application of biosensors in agriculture, agrobiotechnology, food processing, and environmental monitoring has barely been realized.

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Environmental Impacts and Rapid Analysis by Biosensors of Agrochemicals in Korea and Australia (한국과 호주에서의 Biosensor 에 의한 농약의 환경영향 조기검출)

  • Lim, Soo-Kil;Kennedy, I.R.;Lee, Sung-Eun;Jeong, Chang-Yoon;Kim, Jeong-Gyu
    • Korean Journal of Environmental Agriculture
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    • v.17 no.4
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    • pp.371-378
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    • 1998
  • Pesticide has played important role in Korean and Austrailian agriculture. In addition, pesticides are the most reliable tools pests in agriculture. Recently, it is highly recommended that the use of pesticide should be concerned with both atricultural and environmental aspect, also legislation on environmental contamination has been fortified to the world. Particularly, the attention on agrochemicals has been focused on the soil abuse and the water contamination at present time. In spite of this kind of concern, a few research about pesticides using in Australia and Korean have been conducted to their behaviors under australian and korean environment to avoid environmental contamination by pesticides. Thus, the research organizations need facilities to analyze the characteristics of each pesticide and the environmental fate of pesticides. The conventional analytical method to detect pesticides and their metabolites can not be overcome to reduce time, expenditure, and complexity of analysis even though the methods are accurate and precise. For example, High performance liquid chromatography(HPLC), and gas chromatography (GC) used until now are less choice detectors and often lower sensitive. In contrast to the conventional analytical methods, biosensors are so fast in analysis and has high productivity and analyze multi=sample simultaneously. Therefore, it is biosensing analytical method that we could consider as an alternative method intead of the conventional methods.

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The Theory and Application or Piezoelectric Quartz Crystal Microbalance[PZ QCM] for Biosensor (압전 수정 결정 미량 천평[PZ QCM] 바이오센서의 원리와 응용)

  • 김의락
    • KSBB Journal
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    • v.18 no.2
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    • pp.79-89
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    • 2003
  • This article contains an overview of acoustic wave devices, the theory and application of piezoelectric quartz crystal microbalances(PZ QCM), clinical analysis, gas phase detection, DNA biosensors, drug analysis, food microbial analysis and environmental analysis.

Single Nanoparticle Photoluminescence Studies of Visible Light-Sensitive TiO2 and ZnO Nanostructures

  • Yoon, Minjoong
    • Rapid Communication in Photoscience
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    • v.2 no.1
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    • pp.9-17
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    • 2013
  • Visible light-sensitive $TiO_2$ and ZnO nanostructure materials have attracted great attention as the promising material for solar energy conversion systems such as photocatalysts for water splitting and environmental purification as well as nano-biosensors. Success of their applications relies on how to control their surface state behaviors related to the exciton dynamics and optoelectronic properties. In this paper, we briefly review some recent works on single nanoparticle photoluminescence (PL) technique and its application to observation of their surface state behaviors which are raveled by the conventional ensemble-averaged spectroscopic techniques. This review provides an opportunity to understand the temporal and spatial heterogeneities within an individual nanostructure, allowing for the potential use of single-nanoparticle approaches in studies of their photoenergy conversion and nano-scale optical biosensing.

Microbial Fuel Cells: Principles and Applications to Environmental Health (미생물 연료전지의 원리 및 환경보건 분야로의 응용)

  • Han, Sun-Kee
    • Journal of Environmental Health Sciences
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    • v.38 no.2
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    • pp.83-94
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    • 2012
  • The research on microbial fuel cells (MFCs) needs various knowledge of different fields such as electrochemistry, microbiology, environmental engineering, and material engineering. Although electrochemically active bacteria are very diverse, the performance of MFCs is affected primarily by the structure of the reactor system. Thus, the development in the system architecture is critical to lower internal resistance and increase power generation for commercialization. This paper summarizes the principles of MFCs and demonstrates the infinite potential of MFCs in various applications including wastewater treatment, biosensors, biohydrogen production, remote power sources, implantable medical devices, etc.

Development of Livestock Monitoring Device based on Biosensors for Preventing Livestock Diseases

  • Park, Myeong-Chul;Jung, Hyon-Chel;Ha, Ok-Kyoon
    • Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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    • v.21 no.10
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    • pp.91-98
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    • 2016
  • Outbreaks of highly contagious livestock diseases can cause direct and indirect economic impacts such as lower productivity of cattle farms, fall in tourism in damaged areas and countries, and decline in exports. They also incur tremendous social costs associated with disease elimination and restoration work. Thus, it is essential to prevent livestock diseases through monitoring and prediction efforts. Currently, however, it is still difficult to provide accurate predictive information regarding occurrences of livestock diseases, because existing cattle health monitoring or forecasting systems are only limited to monitor environmental conditions of livestock barns and check activities of cattle by using a pedometer or thermal image. In this paper, we present a biosensor-based cattle health monitoring system capable of collecting bio-signals of farm animals in an effective way. For the presented monitoring system, we design an integrated monitoring device consisting of a sensing module to measure bio-signals of cattle such as the heartbeat, the breath rate and the momentum, as well as a Zigbee module designed to transmit the biometric data based on Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). We verify the validity of the monitoring system by the comparison of the correlations of designed device with a commercial ECG equipment through analyzing the R-peak of measured signals.