Liwei Lin (Advisor)

Flexible, wearable, and implantable devices are expected to become more abundant due to developments in materials and microfabrication technologies. In our previous work, we have successfully achieved a kind of flexible actuators that can work at low voltage and give haptic feedback. Now we are moving forward to develop energy harvesters with various sets of flexible materials and structures that can 1) harvest energy from outside stable environment; 2) generate electricity in a relatively long time; and 3) give enough energy output to power up small devices.

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The next big thing, AR/VR, requires an immersive Human Machine Interface (HMI) in addition to visual and sound stimuli. Although skin is the biggest organ in the human body, very few efforts compared to visual and auditory senses have been done to develop a “sense of touch”. The mechanical stimulus to generate the touch sense by the embedded mechanoreceptors in the skin at different depths has been created in many ways as vibratory actuators, microneedles, etc. In this project, we are investigating to create haptic interface via radiation force generated by piezoelectric...

Ultrasonics has been realized as a nondestructive measurement method for a variety of applications, such as medical imaging, healthcare monitoring, structural testing, range finding, and motion sensing. Furthermore, high intensity ultrasound can be used in therapeutic treatments, such as lithotripsy for kidney stone comminution, hyperthermia for cancer therapy, high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) for laparoscopic surgery and transcranial sonothrombolysis for brain stroke treatment. MEMS ultrasonic transducers are known to have several pronounced advantages over the conventional...

Traditional Chinese medicine(TCM) has existed for more than two thousand years and one of the important diagnostic methods is the pulse diagnosis. It generally takes decades of training for a practitioner to master this skill as pulse acquisition and diagnosis require long-term experiences and are very subjective. The project aims to use the combination of advanced sensor technology and artificial intelligence to emulate the TCM practice for health monitoring. A flexible piezoelectric film is designed to record the wrist pulse data. A group of representative pulse features has been...