Liwei Lin (Advisor)

Piezoelectric micromachined ultrasonic transducers (pMUTs) could enable unique applications in medical imaging, healthcare, human-machine interfaces, and point-of-care testing. This work presents the first time pMUTs are implemented for biological age assessment via growth plate detections. Traditionally, the biological age can be examined by sophisticated equipment in a lab such as by DNA methylation and telomere attrition [1]. We propose a novel method with three key advancements: (1) a wearable ultrasound device for biological age detection by a compact pMUTs chip; (2) a beamforming...

As smart devices dominate larger areas of day-to-day life, their ability to communicate with human users must improve. While skin is the largest organ in the human body, relatively few efforts have gone toward developing more adaptive ways to utilize the "sense of touch" compared to visual and auditory signaling. The mechanical stimulus to generate a sense of touch by the embedded mechanoreceptors in the skin at different depths has been created in previous ways via vibratory actuators, requiring bulky and specialized offset masses and motors. In this project, we are investigating the...

Surface tension plays an important role in miniaturized systems as the scaling law favors its relative significance over other forces such as gravity, magnetic, and structural stiffness. As such, surface tension effects have induced process issues in microfabrication such as stiction but also provided opportunities in using the surface tension to drive microdevices, such as those based on electrowetting-on-dielectric (EWOD), electrocapillary, and continuous electrowetting (CEW) mechanism, … etc. In this project, we exploit the giant outputs by the switching of surface tension...