Life-enhancing device

Life enhancing devices might treat conditions, like severe, chronic lower back pain, that do not threaten a patient s life, but prevent normal functiOTi and reduce their quality of life. 

There are several ways to classify medical devices. Some provide therapeutic functions while others are used for diagnostic purposes. Some provide both functions. For therapeutic devices, devices may be further described as life sustaining or life enhancing (improves the quality of life). 

The smart materials /stmctures field is new. As these materials are better understood, better devices can designed with them and the quaHty of life may be enhanced. 

Moreover, the introductory chemistry course, along with introductory calculus, serves as a foundation course to technical careers. Unpleasant experiences in these courses or poor performance in them often results in the loss of these students from the future technical labor-force pipeline. Enhancing the appeal of these courses is a viable strategy for kindling interest in technical careers across the spectrum of student customers . For the many students who will not pursue technical careers, a materials-oriented chemistry course can provide a sense of relevance by connecting chemistry to advanced materials and devices that we increasingly encounter in everyday life. 

The MOSFET heater is directly driven with this bit stream or optionally, the bit stream can be routed through a low pass filter. Early experiments revealed that driving the heater transistor with the raw bit stream might cause some electromigration due to the large peak currents that occur. The low-pass filter was therefore included to avoid such current peaks in order to enhance the device stability and life time. 

In an early study by Schery and Gaeddert (1982), an accumulator device was used to measure the effect of atmospheric pressure variations on the flux of Radon (222Rn), an inert radioactive element with a half-life of 3.8 days, from the soil. Fluxes measured by the accumulator were compared with predictions for flow-free diffusion from a model developed by Clements and Wilkening (1974), which applies Fick s law. A mean 222Rn-flux enhancement of about 10%, with a high value of 20%, due to cyclic atmospheric pressure variations was observed. However, the device s effectiveness was limited by back diffusion from the accumulator to the subsurface, leading the authors to view the flux values as semi-quantitative. 

The most welcome technical achievements in life science are the ones that enhance well-being or restore impaired or lost biological functions. Rehabilitation engineering is a research field that has devoted its full spectrum of efforts to compensate for malfunctions and disorders in human biological systems. This includes the development of devices for the rehabilitation of neural disorders which are termed neural prostheses. Neural prostheses directly interface with the central and peripheral nervous system. The most commonly known neural prosthesis is the cardiac pacemaker, which has existed for more than 30 years. A variety of other lesser known devices have been developed to partially restore neural functions in disabled people. 

Coal contains most of the elements of the periodic table, the majority of which are present in concentrations of 100 ppm or less. Many of these trace elements are toxic to plant and animal life, even at low levels. Because U.S. power plants consune on the order of 600 million tons of coal annually for the production of electricity (1), coal combustion can mobilize thousands of tons of potentially hazardous trace elements into the environment each year. Due to the large quantities of coal combusted, even trace amounts of toxic elements present in the coals can accumulate to hazardous levels. Also, potentially deleterious effects of particulate emissions from coal combustion may be enhanced since many trace elements are surface-enriched (2) and concentrate preferentially in the smaller, more respirable particle sizes (3). Substantial amounts of some elements, such as As, Hg, and Se, are in the vapor phase in flue gases from coal combustion and are essentially unaffected by most particle control devices. Aside from the potential detrimental environmental aspects, trace elements in coal can pose adverse technological... 

Solid electrolytes for lithium-ion batteries are expected to offer several advantages over traditional, nonaqueous liquid electrolytes. A solid electrolyte would give a longer shelf life, along with an enhancement in specific energy density. A solid electrolyte may also eliminate the need for a distinct separator material, such as the polypropylene or polyethylene microporous separators commonly used in contemporary liquid electrolyte-based batteries. Solid electrolytes are also desirable over liquid electrolytes in certain specialty applications where bulk lithium-ion batteries as weU as thin-film lithium-ion batteries are needed for primary and backup power supplies for systems, devices, and individual integrated circuit chips. 

Many other applications for plasma polymers in the Life Sciences have been dted, often in relation to implantable medical devices or materials, with the goal of concealing the device from the bodies defence mechanisms, or improving cell colonisation of the material, e.g. endothelial cell growth into vascular grafts. A number of excellent studies from the group of Hans Griesser (CSIRO, Australia) describe the use of plasma polymers as substrates to which biomolecules can be immobilised. These immobilisations have been demonstrated to enhance the medium-term acceptability of contact lens materials and may prove relevant to implantable devices. 

Sumatriptan, the most extensively studied antimigraine therapy, is available for subcutaneous, oral, and intranasal administration. Subcutaneous sumatriptan is consistently superior to placebo in alleviating migraine headache and associated symptoms, with relief reported in 71% of patients at 1 hour (43% pain-free) and 79% at 2 hours (60% pain-free) in a meta-analysis of placebo-controlled studies. " In addition to enhanced efficacy, subcutaneous sumatriptan has amore rapid onsetof action (10 minutes) when compared with the oral formulation (30 minutes). " The subcutaneous injection is packaged as an autoinjector device for self-administration by patients. Intranasal sumatriptan provides a faster onset of effect (15 minutes) than the oral formulation and produces similar rates of response (relief in 61% of patients at 2 hours) in placebo-controlled studies." Approximately 30% to 40% of patients who respond to sumatriptan experience headache recurrence within 24 hours." This has been attributed to the drug s short half-life, but recurrence is a problem with most acute migraine therapies. " A second dose given at the time of recurrence usually is effective. 

Further, introduction of new technological concepts like electrical doping of transport layers has enhanced the OLED efficiency to more than 100 Im/W and enhanced life time of the devices to more than 100,000 hours which is better than the gas filled discharge lamps (Murano et al 2005). However, efficiency and lifetime are still considered widely as the big obstacles on the road of OLED development. A further impa-ovement in the OLED performance relies on the more detailed xmderstanding of the EL physics and the new development in the OLED materials, structure and fabrication. 

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