BACKGROUND Cognitive impairment is common in people with neurological diseases and severely affects their social and professional life. It has been shown that intensive and personalized cognitive rehabilitation (CR), based on working memory exercises, leads to improved cognitive status of healthy and cognitive-impaired subjects. New technologies would help to promote accessible, at-home, and se...

We introduce a new class of problems that contains two existing classes: allocation problems with single-peaked preferences and bankruptcy problems. On this class, we analyze the implications of well-known properties such as Pareto optimality, strategy-proofness, resource-monotonicity, no-envy, equal treatment of equals, and two new properties we introduce, hierarchical no-envy and independence...

We describe the development of a handheld stamp for the production of microfluidic paper-based analytical devices. The paper surface was oxidized for allowing the covalent coupling of enzymes. The chemical modification led to improvements on the color uniformity. The relative standard deviation values for glucose and uric acid assays decreased from 40 to 10% and from 20 to 8%, respectively. The...

We have developed a paper-based analytical device as a platform for colorimetric detection of pathogenic bacteria responsible for foodborne illness. The food industry currently relies on time-consuming and complex analysis techniques to determine the presence of live Escherichia coli, Listeria monocytogenes, and Salmonella enterica in food products. Advantages of the paper-based design include ...

We report a new microfluidic emitter for nano-electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (nanoESI-MS), made from polyimide tape. In contrast to the conventional pulled glass capillary emitters typically used for nanoESI-MS, these new polyimide emitters are simple and inexpensive to make, and are disposable after a single use. Thus, sample contamination and clogging are never a problem when analy...

In this work, we designed, fabricated and tested a disposable, flow-through amperometric sensor for free chlorine determination in water. The sensor is based on the principle of an electrochemical cell. The substrate, as well as the top microfluidic layer, is made up of a polymer material. The advantages include; (a) disposability from low cost; (b) stable operation range from three-electrode d...

A review is presented of advances and challenges in fully integrated systems for personalised medicine applications. One key issue for the commercialisation of such systems is the disposability of the assay-substrate at a low cost. This work adds a new dimension to the integrated circuits technology for lab-on-a-chip systems by employing 3D integration for improved performance and functionality...

A disposable endoscopic platform with actuation motors inside the body of the endoscope is presented. This platform can enable new medical devices for diagnosis and for minimally invasive surgeries. This paper addresses mechanical and safety issues with existing endoscope technologies by incorporating disposability, safety modules, and lower cable forces. In order to produce path-independent ca...

Anchor points play an important role in DEA theory and application. They define the transition from the efficient frontier to the “free-disposability” portion of the boundary. Our objective is to use the geometrical properties of anchor points to design and test an algorithm for their identification. We focus on the variable returns to scale production possibility set; our results do not depend...

In this paper, we study a generalization of z-ideals in the ring C(X) of continuous real valued functions on a completely regular Hausdorff space X. The notion of a weak ideal and naturally a weak z-ideal and a prime weak ideal are introduced and it turns out that they behave such as z-ideals in C(X).