Self-Assistant: Portable Progressive Muscle Relaxation Training Interface for Anxiety Reduction in Office Workers

Workload often triggers anxiety for office workers. While a variety of stress intervention and management techniques have been explored, there exist only a few of portable tangible interfaces for anxiety reduction. Contributing to the body of work, we introduce Self-Assistant, a portable anxiety intervention training interface. This is based on progressive muscle relaxation training which is an effective way for reducing stress and raise awareness of tension, and provide feelings of deep relaxation. This interface incorporates a stress ball with a pressure sensor and visual indicators which help track the user's anxiety level through squeeze actions. This is designed to help improve self-awareness of anxiety and stress, in turn self-regulating bodily functions, offering rapid and low-sensory stimulus training for anxiety relief. Finally, we discuss application scenarios and future work with Self-Assistant.Comment: Short Technical Report: Best student-led project in COMP0145: Research Methods and Making Skills (2022/23

Wearable Devices for Single-Cell Sensing and Transfection

Wearable healthcare devices are mainly used for biosensing and transdermal delivery. Recent advances in wearable biosensors allow for long-term and real-time monitoring of physiological conditions at a cellular resolution. Transdermal drug delivery systems have been further scaled down, enabling wide selections of cargo, from natural molecules (e.g., insulin and glucose) to bioengineered molecules (e.g., nanoparticles). Some emerging nanopatches show promise for precise single-cell gene transfection in vivo and have advantages over conventional tools in terms of delivery efficiency, safety, and controllability of delivered dose. In this review, we discuss recent technical advances in wearable micro/nano devices with unique capabilities or potential for single-cell biosensing and transfection in the skin or other organs, and suggest future directions for these fields. Highlights • Current wearable sensors have allowed for long-term, real-time detection of specific biomarkers directly from patients. • Miniaturized wearable biosensors with sensing elements interacting with skin or organs can capture target molecules from single cells, which results in significantly increased sensitivity, responding time, and precision. • Emerging wearable devices based on novel nanomaterials or nanofabrication show potential for single-cell detection in cancer cell screening, cardiomyocyte detection, and optogenetics. • Transdermal delivery devices have been scaled down to the micro- and/or nanoscale, and their applications have extended to wide selections of natural molecules and bioengineered molecules. • Emerging nanodevices show unique capabilities in precise single-cell gene transfection in vivo, with improved delivery efficiency, safety, and dose controllability

High Throughput and Highly Controllable Methods for in Vitro Intracellular Delivery

In vitro and ex vivo intracellular delivery methods hold the key for releasing the full potential of tissue engineering, drug development, and many other applications. In recent years, there has been significant progress in the design and implementation of intracellular delivery systems capable of delivery at the same scale as viral transfection and bulk electroporation but offering fewer adverse outcomes. This review strives to examine a variety of methods for in vitro and ex vivo intracellular delivery such as flow-through microfluidics, engineered substrates, and automated probe-based systems from the perspective of throughput and control. Special attention is paid to a particularly promising method of electroporation using micro/nanochannel based porous substrates, which expose small patches of cell membrane to permeabilizing electric field. Porous substrate electroporation parameters discussed include system design, cells and cargos used, transfection efficiency and cell viability, and the electric field and its effects on molecular transport. The review concludes with discussion of potential new innovations which can arise from specific aspects of porous substrate-based electroporation platforms and high throughput, high control methods in general

Micro/Nano biomedical devices for point-of-care diagnosis of infectious respiratory diseases

Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has developed into a global pandemic in the last two years, causing significant impacts on our daily life in many countries. Rapid and accurate detection of COVID-19 is of great importance to both treatments and pandemic management. Till now, a variety of point-of-care testing (POCT) approaches devices, including nucleic acid-based test and immunological detection, have been developed and some of them has been rapidly ruled out for clinical diagnosis of COVID-19 due to the requirement of mass testing. In this review, we provide a summary and commentary on the methods and biomedical devices innovated or renovated for the quick and early diagnosis of COVID-19. In particular, some of micro and nano devices with miniaturized structures, showing outstanding analytical performances such as ultra-sensitivity, rapidness, accuracy and low cost, are discussed in this paper. We also provide our insights on the further implementation of biomedical devices using advanced micro and nano technologies to meet the demand of point-of-care diagnosis and home testing to facilitate pandemic management. In general, our paper provides a comprehensive overview of the latest advances on the POCT device for diagnosis of COVID-19, which may provide insightful knowledge for researcher to further develop novel diagnostic technologies for rapid and on-site detection of pathogens including SARS-CoV-2.Natural Environment Research Council (NERC): NE/R013349/

Genetic and phenotypic profiling of single living circulating tumour cells from patients with microfluidics

Accurate prediction of the efficacy of immunotherapy for cancer patients through the characterization of both genetic and phenotypic heterogeneity in individual patient cells holds great promise in informing targeted treatments, and ultimately in improving care pathways and clinical outcomes. Here, we describe the nanoplatform for interrogating living cell host-gene and (micro-)environment (NICHE) relationships, that integrates micro- and nanofluidics to enable highly efficient capture of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from blood samples. The platform uses a unique nanopore-enhanced electrodelivery system that efficiently and rapidly integrates stable multichannel fluorescence probes into living CTCs for in situ quantification of target gene expression, while on-chip coculturing of CTCs with immune cells allows for the real-time correlative quantification of their phenotypic heterogeneities in response to immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI). The NICHE microfluidic device provides a unique ability to perform both gene expression and phenotypic analysis on the same single cells in situ, allowing us to generate a predictive index for screening patients who could benefit from ICI. This index, which simultaneously integrates the heterogeneity of single cellular responses for both gene expression and phenotype, was validated by clinically tracing 80 non–small cell lung cancer patients, demonstrating significantly higher AUC (area under the curve) (0.906) than current clinical reference for immunotherapy prediction

Targeting of the Human Coagulation Factor IX Gene at rDNA Locus of Human Embryonic Stem Cells

BACKGROUND: Genetic modification is a prerequisite to realizing the full potential of human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) in human genetic research and regenerative medicine. Unfortunately, the random integration methods that have been the primary techniques used keep creating problems, and the primary alternative method, gene targeting, has been effective in manipulating mouse embryonic stem cells (mESCs) but poorly in hESCs. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Human ribosomal DNA (rDNA) repeats are clustered on the short arm of acrocentric chromosomes. They consist of approximately 400 copies of the 45S pre-RNA (rRNA) gene per haploid. In the present study, we targeted a physiological gene, human coagulation factor IX, into the rDNA locus of hESCs via homologous recombination. The relative gene targeting efficiency (>50%) and homologous recombination frequency (>10(-5)) were more than 10-fold higher than those of loci targeted in previous reports. Meanwhile, the targeted clones retained both a normal karyotype and the main characteristics of ES cells. The transgene was found to be stably and ectopically expressed in targeted hESCs. CONCLUSION/SIGNIFICANCE: This is the first targeting of a human physiological gene at a defined locus on the hESC genome. Our findings indicate that the rDNA locus may serve as an ideal harbor for transgenes in hESCs

Wearable Devices for Single-Cell Sensing and Transfection

Wearable healthcare devices are mainly used for biosensing and transdermal delivery. Recent advances in wearable biosensors allow for long-term and real-time monitoring of physiological conditions at a cellular resolution. Transdermal drug delivery systems have been further scaled down, enabling wide selections of cargo, from natural molecules (e.g., insulin and glucose) to bioengineered molecules (e.g., nanoparticles). Some emerging nanopatches show promise for precise single-cell gene transfection in vivo and have advantages over conventional tools in terms of delivery efficiency, safety, and controllability of delivered dose. In this review, we discuss recent technical advances in wearable micro/nano devices with unique capabilities or potential for single-cell biosensing and transfection in the skin or other organs, and suggest future directions for these fields. Highlights • Current wearable sensors have allowed for long-term, real-time detection of specific biomarkers directly from patients. • Miniaturized wearable biosensors with sensing elements interacting with skin or organs can capture target molecules from single cells, which results in significantly increased sensitivity, responding time, and precision. • Emerging wearable devices based on novel nanomaterials or nanofabrication show potential for single-cell detection in cancer cell screening, cardiomyocyte detection, and optogenetics. • Transdermal delivery devices have been scaled down to the micro- and/or nanoscale, and their applications have extended to wide selections of natural molecules and bioengineered molecules. • Emerging nanodevices show unique capabilities in precise single-cell gene transfection in vivo, with improved delivery efficiency, safety, and dose controllability

3D morphology reconstruction of high aspect ratio MEMS structure by using autofluorescence of Parylene C

This paper reported a MEMS fabrication compatible, damage free method for in-process 3D morphology reconstruction of high aspect ratio microstructure. As a novel morphology tracer, Parylene C thin film was conformally deposited onto the structure and annealed at high temperature under N-2. The autofluorescence of Parylene C was considerably enhanced by the annealing, which made it possible to image the microstructure. By scanning with a confocal microscopy, 3D morphology of the microstructure was reconstructed. The preliminary result indicated that microstructure with width of 8 mu m and depth of 34 mu m (34.1 mu m actual depth by SEM) was successfully and accurately measured by this method.EICPCI-S(ISTP)[email protected]

Spatiotemporal Pattern of Urban-Rural Integration Development and Its Driving Mechanism Analysis in Hangzhou Bay Urban Agglomeration

The quantitative analysis of the urban-rural integration development (URID) level and its driving factors is of great significance for the new-type urbanization of urban agglomerations. This study constructed a multidimensional framework in the perspective of a population–space–economy–society–ecology framework to measure the URID level from 2000 to 2020 and further explored the driving mechanism of the URID changes by a geographical detector model in the Hangzhou Bay urban agglomeration (HBUA). The results showed that the land-use change in the HBUA from 2000 to 2020 showed a typical characteristic of the transition between cultivated and construction land. The URID level in the HBUA improved from 0.294 in 2000 to 0.563 in 2020, and the year 2005 may have been the inflection point of URID in the HBUA. The URID level showed a significant spatial aggregation with high values. Hangzhou, Jiaxing, and Ningbo were hot spots since 2015, and the cold spots were Huzhou and Shaoxing. The population and spatial integration had more important impacts on URID levels in 2000, 2005, and 2020, while economic and social integration had more significant impacts on URID levels in 2010 and 2015. This study provided a deeper understanding of the evolution of URID in an urban agglomeration and could be used as a reference for decision makers