This paper describes an ultra compact and high sensitivity fluidic sensor suitable for measuring flow velocity and direction with the operating principle of detecting flow-induced temperature gradient on the surface. This flow sensor is fabricated utilizing surface micromachining technologies on a silicon substrate. The flow sensor has high sensitivity of flow velocities as high as 0.01m/s. Polycrystalline silicon (poly-Si) film heater and poly-Si/Aluminum thermocouples are adopted on a dielectric thin film membrane thermally isolated from the substrate.

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We introduce a novel MEMS device for various biocells measurements by singular cell level with parallel analysis and high throughput. This paper deals with the details of its fabrication, including device packaging, and the practical measurement of red blood cell using a twin microcantilever type sensor array. Based on a simple measurement of the electrical impedance of a living single red blood cell and its suspension, an important set of data, which can be used to describe living matter, could be obtained. It was confirmed that the electrical impedance between normal and abnormal red blood cells was different in magnitude and phase shift.

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A gas-phase water-repellent silanization coating technique, which prevents the microscopic structures used for micro-sensors and micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) from sticking to the silicon substrates and other microscopic structures during operation, have been developed. Use of a water-repellent coating is one method that prevents sticking by reducing the surface energy of the structure. The water-repellency characteristics of three types of organosilicon compounds were evaluated. It was found that a water-repellent silanization coating layer using (tridecafluoro - 1, 1, 2, 2 -tetrahydrooctyl) trichlorosilane (C₈H₄Cl₃F₁₃Si) had most excellent durability. It was confirmed that the water contact angle of C₈H₄Cl₃F₁₃Si coating layer is exceeding 90 degrees at surface of standard semiconductor materials except nickel. In addition, the C₈H₄Cl₃F₁₃Si coating layer can be patterned by ultraviolet irradiation.

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We evaluated micro-channel made of photosensitive sheet at the point of chemical proof and electric insulation. As the results, the device had been resistant to neutral aqueous solution, the sheet had a high electric insulation of 10¹² Ω·cm. For an application, we fabricated the microfluidic device with electrochemical detector in a microchannel. The experimental results were agreed well with theoretical values.

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Many kinds of chemical sensors have been developed to detect various air-pollutants. Generally sensor systems are composed of plural chemical sensors and a computer, and the systems can derive kinds of pollutants, densities of the pollutants, and various risks for environments and humans. Regarding the research of sensor systems, there are literatures about a sensor agent, which regards a sensor as an agent, and a utility mobile robot which attaches odor sensors. In these systems, it is necessary that observed results output by the sensors are exactly analyzed with information processing; especially, it is important to recognize the occurrence of events such as outbreaks of odor, however, this kind of recognitions are still not enough and it does not mean that the systems can recognize all the environmental events. In this research, odor sensors are treated and generally odor sensors are designed modeling functions of human nose. Hence, as well as odor sensors, we aim improving the accuracy of environmental recognitions using an odor sensor system attaching an information processing function according to human senses. In addition, we show the usefulness of the proposed system comparing with a conventional technique.

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This paper describes the blood beat measurement system with near infra-red ray. A blood vessel was captured sequentially with a CCD camera, an near infra-red LED and an optical filter. In order to extract a blood vessel portion from each captured image, binarization processing was performed using the threshold on the basis of the first captured image. For the reduction of the error caused by the subject's hand slight movement, the position adjustment was performed with the landmark, which was found with skeltonizing and extracting the diverging point. The pixel number of the blood vessel portion was counted and the thickness of the blood vessel was analyzed by performing a Fourier analysis. The Fourier analysis shows the peak at the frequency of 1.4 Hz corresponding to 84 beat count in a minute. For the evaluation of the proposed method, blood beat was measured with a sphygmomanometer simultaneously. As the results, the almost same pulse rate could be obtained from both method. These results indicate that the method has the possibility to count a pulse.

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Wrong:Nozomi Yamamto
Right:Nozomi Yamamoto

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