Soft Electronics and Sensors for Wearable Healthcare Applications

Wearable electronics are becoming increasingly essential to personalized medicine by collecting and analyzing massive amounts of biological signals from internal organs, muscles, and blood vessels. Conventional rigid electronics may lead to motion artifacts and errors in collected data due to the mismatches in mechanical properties between human skin. Instead, soft wearable electronics provide a better platform and interface that can form intimate contact and conformably adapt to human skin. In this respect, this thesis focuses on new materials formulation, fabrication, characterization of low-cost, high sensitivity and reliable sensors for wearable health monitoring applications. More specifically, we have studied the silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) inkjet-printed on a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) substrate that offers great pressure sensitivity for aterial pulse monitoring. In addition, we have investigated the conducting polymer poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) polystyrene sulfonate (PEDOT:PSS) and poly(ethylene oxide) PEO polymer blends that exhibit low sheet resistance and can resist up to 50\% of tensile strain. The highly stretchable thin film can serve as interconnects between electronic components and dry electrodes for photoplethysmography (PPG) and electrocardiography (ECG) recordings. Based on the developed PEDOT:PSS solution with high conductivity, we fabricated a porous PDMS sponge coated with conductive PEDOT:PSS to make electrodes with reduced electrode-skin contact impedance, improved signal-to-noise ratio and is suited for long-term and motion-artifact-tolerant recording of high quality biopotential signals including ECG and electromyography (EMG). Finally, we demonstrated a multimodal sensor based on the porous PEDOT:PSS/PDMS sponge for sensing and distinguishing of pressure, strain and temperature from different trends in resistance and capacitance response. Applications including object detection, gesture recognition and temperature sensing have all been demonstrated. In this thesis, the proposed materials, sensor design, low-cost inkjet printing and dip-coating fabrication process open the possibility for more complex epidermal wearable health monitoring electronic systems

Experimental quantum key distribution with source flaws

Decoy-state quantum key distribution (QKD) is a standard technique in current quantum cryptographic implementations. Unfortunately, existing experiments have two important drawbacks: the state preparation is assumed to be perfect without errors and the employed security proofs do not fully consider the finite-key effects for general attacks. These two drawbacks mean that existing experiments are not guaranteed to be secure in practice. Here, we perform an experiment that for the first time shows secure QKD with imperfect state preparations over long distances and achieves rigorous finite-key security bounds for decoy-state QKD against coherent attacks in the universally composable framework. We quantify the source flaws experimentally and demonstrate a QKD implementation that is tolerant to channel loss despite the source flaws. Our implementation considers more real-world problems than most previous experiments and our theory can be applied to general QKD systems. These features constitute a step towards secure QKD with imperfect devices.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, updated experiment and theor

Poly[[(μ-1H-benzimidazole-5,6-dicarboxyl­ato)zinc(II)] monohydrate]

The three-dimensional polymeric title compound, {[Zn(C9H4N2O4)]·H2O}n, contains one crystallographically independent ZnII atom, one fully deprotonated 1H-benzimid­azole-5,6-dicarboxyl­ate (bdc) ligand and one uncoordinated water mol­ecule. The ZnII atom is four-coordinated by three O atoms and one N atom from the bdc ligands, giving a distorted tetra­hedral coordination geometry. The uncoordinated water mol­ecule is bound to the main structure through a strong bdc–water N—H⋯O hydrogen bond, and two much weaker water–bdc O—H⋯O inter­actions

Efficient Multi-Party Quantum Secret Sharing Schemes

In this work, we generalize the quantum secret sharing scheme of Hillary, Bu\v{z}ek and Berthiaume[Phys. Rev. A59, 1829(1999)] into arbitrary multi-parties. Explicit expressions for the shared secret bit is given. It is shown that in the Hillery-Bu\v{z}ek-Berthiaume quantum secret sharing scheme the secret information is shared in the parity of binary strings formed by the measured outcomes of the participants. In addition, we have increased the efficiency of the quantum secret sharing scheme by generalizing two techniques from quantum key distribution. The favored-measuring-basis Quantum secret sharing scheme is developed from the Lo-Chau-Ardehali technique[H. K. Lo, H. F. Chau and M. Ardehali, quant-ph/0011056] where all the participants choose their measuring-basis asymmetrically, and the measuring-basis-encrypted Quantum secret sharing scheme is developed from the Hwang-Koh-Han technique [W. Y. Hwang, I. G. Koh and Y. D. Han, Phys. Lett. A244, 489 (1998)] where all participants choose their measuring-basis according to a control key. Both schemes are asymptotically 100% in efficiency, hence nearly all the GHZ-states in a quantum secret sharing process are used to generate shared secret information.Comment: 7 page

The Nucleolus of Caenorhabditis elegans

Nucleolar size and appearance correlate with ribosome biogenesis and cellular activity. The mechanisms underlying changes in nucleolar appearance and regulation of nucleolar size that occur during differentiation and cell cycle progression are not well understood. Caenorhabditis elegans provides a good model for studying these processes because of its small size and transparent body, well-characterized cell types and lineages, and because its cells display various sizes of nucleoli. This paper details the advantages of using C. elegans to investigate features of the nucleolus during the organism's development by following dynamic changes in fibrillarin (FIB-1) in the cells of early embryos and aged worms. This paper also illustrates the involvement of the ncl-1 gene and other possible candidate genes in nucleolar-size control. Lastly, we summarize the ribosomal proteins involved in life span and innate immunity, and those homologous genes that correspond to human disorders of ribosomopathy