Emilio Sardini

Università degli Studi di Brescia | UNIBS · Department of Information Engineering

Temperature sensors have been widely developed to control the course of diseases, improve haptic feelings, and in multi-sensing systems to compensate for the output of other temperature-sensitive sensors. The use of additive manufacturing to produce resistive temperature detectors (RTDs) with reduced dimensions and bulkiness is attracting great int...

The article proposes a fully printed microelectrode array (MEA) as a proof of concept for the feasibility of a customized and low-cost bioelectronic device. The target application is to promote the maturation of the cell culture by providing biophysical stimuli and evaluating the functionality of the bioengineered products, monitoring in real-time...

In the latest years, hydrogen peroxide quantification gained a growing interest in many fields both in industry and in the clinical environment. Among the different available methods, electrochemical transducers are of particular interest thanks to their ease of fabrication, convenient integration with microfluidics and electronics and their time a...

The paper focuses on a preliminary study of an easy-to-customize capacitive soft sensor to measure forces that can enable soft robot features like sensitive skins or permits dexterous object manipulation thanks to the perception of the grasping force. The prototype has been realized overlapping five different layers choose among commercial and easy...

Every year in Europe more than 500 thousand injuries that involve the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) are diagnosed. The ACL is one of the main restraints within the human knee, focused on stabilizing the joint and controlling the relative movement between the tibia and femur under mechanical stress (i.e., laxity). Ligament laxity measurement is c...

The microelectrode arrays (MEAs) have become a valuable tool in the study of electrophysiological analysis of in vitro electrogenic cells. Aerosol-Jet Printing (AJP) is an alternative to traditional fabrication technique. AJP allows the development of flexible and customized devices. Here we present a computational modelling method using Comsol Mul...

Recent advances in technologies for biosensor integration in mobile or wearable devices have highlighted the need for the definition of proper validation procedures and technical standards that enable testing, verification and validation of the overall performance of these solutions. Thus, reliable assessment—in terms of limits of detection/quantit...

In this work, we report the manufacturing and experimental analysis of low-cost and eco-friendly paper-based gas sensors for food smart packaging. The hygroscopic properties of paper help detect the presence of water-soluble gases in an environment provided with relative humidity (RH) above a given threshold (RH $\,{>}\,75$ %) and discovering the...

The growing diffusion and usability of additive printing techniques have created new manufacturing scenarios for products. Printed electronics is playing a key role in the design of next-generation objects. These objects are no longer only able to fulfill their original function, but through specific sensors and circuits can measure physical quanti...

In the last years, increasing interest has been addressed on wearable devices for the continuous monitoring of biochemical profiles of patients and athletes. Among various markers, lactate represents one of the most interesting to deepen the knowledge on fatigue processes, in combination with traditional electromyographic features. In this work, we...

Electrochemical sensors are attracting great interest for their different applications. To improve their performances, basic research focuses on two main issues: improve their metrological characteristics (e.g., repeatability, reusability and sensitivity) and investigate innovative fabrication processes. In this work, we demonstrate an innovative m...

Aerosol jet printing (AJP) is a promising printing technology for fabricating sensors and electronics, due to its high flexibility in ink and substrate selection. Indeed, inks suitable for AJP can differ in morphology (2D and 3D nanoparticle, nanoflake, nanosheet, etc.), in electrical properties (conductive, semiconductive, insulating, etc.), or in...

In recent years, the application of IoT for health purposes, including the intense use of wearable devices, has been considerably growing. Among the wearable devices, the systems for measuring EMG (electromyography) signals are highly investigated. The possibility of recording different signals in a multichannel approach can lead to reliable data t...

The article proposes the development of an innovative prototype of smart orthosis with a fully integrated multi-electrodes matrix for electromyography (EMG), to improve non-invasive personalized recording during rehabilitation. Both electrodes and conductive tracks were effectively printed onto the three-dimensional (3D) surface of the orthosis thr...

In the last decade, measurement of physiological signals has been attracting great interest for both health-care and Industry 4.0 applications. In this context, the electrodes used during signal acquisition play a key role. In this work, we propose the development of dry electrodes for electromyography (EMG), specifically exploiting the possibility...

p class="Abstract">Supervising manual operations performed by workers in industrial environments is crucial in a smart factory. Indeed, the production of products with superior quality, at higher throughput rates and reduced costs with the support of the Industry 4.0 enabling technologies is based on the strict control of all the resources inside t...

Industry 4.0 has radically been transforming the production processes and systems with the adoption of enabling technologies, such as Internet of things (IoT), big data, additive manufacturing (AM), and cloud computing. In this context, sensors are essential to extract information about production, spare parts, equipment health, and environmental c...

The study of the tongue - especially the analysis of its strength against teeth and palate - provides important information on health conditions or treatment outcomes. In this work, an easy-to-use intra-oral device was designed and fabricated to monitor position and strength of the tongue in real-time, without using cables or tubes. The proposed in...

Printed electrochemical biosensors have recently gained increasing relevance in fields ranging from basic research to home-based point-of-care. Thus, they represent a unique opportunity to enable low-cost, fast, non-invasive and/or continuous monitoring of cells and biomolecules, exploiting their electrical properties. Printing technologies represe...

In Italy, SARS-CoV-2 outbreak registered a high transmission and disease rates. During the acute phase, oncologists provided to re-organize services and prioritize treatments, in order to limit viral spread and to protect cancer patients. The progressive reduction of the number of infections has prompted Italian government to gradually loosen the...

Real time monitoring of temperature and humidity of the air conditioned by Heat and Moisture Exchangers (HMEs) and delivered to patients in intensive care units (ICU) is highly demanded by physicians. As demonstrated by recent literature, only in vivo monitoring of HMEs performances with compact portable measuring systems suitable for ICU routines...

One of the main hurdles to improving scaffolds for regenerative medicine is the development of non-invasive methods to monitor cell proliferation within three-dimensional environments. Recently, an electrical impedance-based approach has been identified as promising for three-dimensional proliferation assays. A low-cost impedance-based solution, ea...

This paper presents the design of a wireless portable and multichannel potentiostat for remote monitoring in enclosed environments for long-time applications. In this paper, the proposed potentiostat is tested for monitoring the glucose concentration during the fermentation of yeast in real time for more than 24 h. The potentiostat is powered by a...

Printed electronics is an expanding research field that can reach the goal of reducing the environmental impact on electronics exploiting renewable and biodegradable materials, like paper. In our work, we designed and tested a new method for fabricating hybrid smart devices on cellulose substrates by aerosol jet printing (AJP) and photonic curing,...

A wearable system that is capable of tracking finger motion and recognizing a set of hand gestures is presented. Two tracking units are worn on two fingers and are wirelessly powered without using cables or batteries, thus enhancing freedom of movement. The system is comprised by two sections: a measurement section and a wireless power transfer app...

Protein electrochemistry represents a powerful technique for investigating the function and structure of proteins. Currently available biochemical assays provide limited information related to the conformational state of proteins and high costs. This work provides novel insights into the electrochemical investigation of the metalloprotein p53 and i...

Printing sensors and electronics directly on the objects is very attractive for producing smart devices, but it is still a challenge. Indeed, in some applications, the substrate that supports the printed electronics could be non-planar or the thermal curing of the functional inks could damage temperature-sensitive substrates such as plastics, fabri...

Impedance-based sensors represent a promising tool for cell monitoring to improve current invasive biological assays. A novel research field is represented by measurements performed in dynamic conditions, monitoring cells (e.g., myocytes) for which the mechanical stimulus plays an important role for promoting maturation. In this picture, we applied...

p class="Abstract">The detection of bacterial infections in biological samples represents a fundamental task in human health preservation. This paper describes a measuring system that aims to detect bacterial growth in Petri dishes while they are inside the incubator of the WASPLab® specimen processing platform (COPAN Italia S.p.A.). In fact, the i...

Supplementary_material_with_revision – Supplemental material for 3D gelatin-chitosan hybrid hydrogels combined with human platelet lysate highly support human mesenchymal stem cell proliferation and osteogenic differentiation

Supplementary_Table_1_rev – Supplemental material for 3D gelatin-chitosan hybrid hydrogels combined with human platelet lysate highly support human mesenchymal stem cell proliferation and osteogenic differentiation

Printed electronics have led to new possibilities in the detection and quantification of a wide range of molecules important for medical, biotechnological, and environmental fields. The integration with microfluidics is often adopted to avoid hand-deposition of little volumes of reagents and samples on miniaturized electrodes that strongly depend o...

Bone marrow and adipose tissue human mesenchymal stem cells were seeded in highly performing 3D gelatin–chitosan hybrid hydrogels of varying chitosan content in the presence of human platelet lysate and evaluated for their proliferation and osteogenic differentiation. Both bone marrow and adipose tissue human mesenchymal stem cells in gelatin–chito...

The demand for the development of swift, simple, and ultrasensitive biosensors has been increasing after the introduction of innovative approaches such as bioelectronics, nanotechnology, and electrochemistry. The possibility to correlate changes in electrical parameters with the concentration of protein biomarkers in biological samples is appealing...

During the last years, scientific research in biotechnology has been reporting a considerable boost forward due to many advances marked in different technological areas. Researchers working in the field of regenerative medicine, mechanobiology and pharmacology have been constantly looking for non-invasive methods able to track tissue development, m...

Aim: To evaluate the conditioning capabilities of the DAR™ Hygrobac™ S, a Heat and Moisture Exchanger (HME), using a new device to measure the temperature (T) and the absolute humidity (AH) of the ventilated gases in vivo during mechanical ventilation in Intensive Care Unit (ICU) patients. Materials and methods: In 49 mechanically ventilated ICU...

Conductive scaffolds are highly used in tissue engineering for bone defect, nerve regeneration, cardiac tissue constructs and many others. Currently, most methods for monitoring cell activities on scaffolds are destructive and invasive such as histological analysis. The research aimed at sensorizing and characterizing a porous gelatin/chitosan scaf...

Energy harvesting from human body has progressively become a preferred option for powering implantable medical devices because of their long lasting lifetime and non-dependence on any external power source. Thus, in this research a low power implantable device with self-powered mechanism has been designed for total knee arthroplasty (TKA) patients....

Background: Colorectal adenocarcinoma cells (Caco-2) are a widely used model of intestinal barrier to study cancer development, toxicological assessments, absorption and metabolism in food science or drug discovery. Caco-2 spontaneously differentiate into a monolayer expressing several specific characteristics, typically showed by mature enterocyt...

Nowadays the world of sensors is gaining a primary importance in the electronics field, thanks to the boom of the smartphones and IoT market. Capacitive sensors are widely involved in the most of applications, from the biomedical to the gaming industry, and they can sense a wide variety of physical quantities. In this work we focused on force sensi...

Devices that track the human body movement are heavily used in numerous and various fields like medicine, automation and entertainment. The work proposed is focused on the design of a modular device able track the flection of human hand phalanxes. The overall system composed by two parts: a computer program interface and a modular wearable system a...

Nowadays, bio-signal based BCI systems are widely being used in healthcare systems and hence proven to be an effective tool in rehabilitation engineering to assist disabled people in improving their quality of life [1]. In this research work, handicapped people with above hand amputee have been targeted and hence non-invasive EEG and EMG biosensors...

As bacterial infection diseases represent a relevant threat for human health worldwide, many efforts are spent in accelerating the diagnostic process of biological specimens. The WASPLab automated platform, by COPAN Italia S.p.A., detects bacterial growth by processing the images of the Petri dishes containing a sample to analyze. This work present...

The possibility to implement engineered devices to obtain feedbacks from biological samples is taking diagnostics and biotechnological research to a new level. Aerosol Jet Printing (AJP) represents a promising technique for this kind of applications. The benefits are related to manufacturing of customized, complex geometries with a high resolution...

Reliable tools for monitoring heat and moisture exchanger (HME) performance are in high demand by physicians, in order to assess the proper air conditioning delivered to intensive care unit (ICU) patients undergoing mechanical ventilation. To date, there is no system that comprehends all the requirements for clinical applications, in terms of perfo...

Body motion tracking technologies are widespread in military, medical and sport fields. The work proposes a modular wireless wearable system able to detect hand fingers motion. Such system is composed by a readout unit that analyses the data and by a wearable measuring device directly applied on the tracked finger. This device is equipped with an I...

In the presented research, design of functional electrical stimulation (FES) based muscle stimulator device has been described which is used to correct and enhance the gait activity of foot drop patients. The device mainly comprises of FES unit for electrical pulse generation, an electromyography (EMG) sensor V3 for feedback system and insole force...

The use of electrochemical sensors for the analysis of biological samples is nowadays widespread and highly demanded from diagnostic and pharmaceutical research, but the reliability and repeatability still remain debated issues. In the expanding field of printed electronics, Aerosol Jet Printing (AJP) appears promising to bring an improvement in re...

Nowadays techniques for sensitive non-invasive, real-time monitoring of cell differentiation and maturation are highly demanded. In light of this, the development of electrochemical printed sensors impedance-based could represent a promising tool. In the present work, we developed 2D ink-jet printed sensors for myoblasts adhesion monitoring, using...

The ability to detect protein biomarkers at a sub-nanomolar level represents a pervasive challenge in order to bring a significant improvement in early diagnosis or progression of pato-physiological processes. To this aim, Screen Printed Electrochemical Sensors have been acquiring a predominant importance. The possibility to use them with different...

Stroke patients are often affected by hemiparesis. In the rehabilitation of these patients the function of the hand is often neglected. Thus in this work we propose a robotic approach to the rehabilitation of the hand of a stroke patient in hospital and also at home. Some experimental results can be presented here especially for inpatients. Further...

The development of sensing techniques for the analysis of protein samples represents an area of great interest for biotechnology, pharmacology and diagnostics. Traditional biochemical assays available present limitations in term time and cost efficiency. On the contrary, optical based techniques, such as spectrophotometry, might offer the interesti...

Flexible capacitive sensors are acquiring more importance in nowadays applications. They are being used in a wide variety of fields, from fingerprints reading to force sensing, from cell growth evaluation to touch sensing. In the biomedical field, research is pushing towards micrometer scale capacitive sensors, requiring a complex fabrication proce...