Piezoelectric materials are widely referred to as "smart" materials because they can transduce mechanical pressure acting on them to electrical signals and vice versa. They are extensively utilized in harvesting mechanical energy from vibrations, human motion, mechanical loads, etc., and converting them into electrical energy for low power devices. Piezoelectric transduction offers high scalability, simple device designs, and high-power densities compared to electro-magnetic/static and triboelectric transducers. This review aims to give a holistic overview of recent developments in piezoelectric nanostructured materials, polymers, polymer nanocomposites, and piezoelectric films for implementation in energy harvesting. The progress in fabrication techniques, morphology, piezoelectric properties, energy harvesting performance, and underpinning fundamental mechanisms for each class of materials, including polymer nanocomposites using conducting, non-conducting, and hybrid fillers are discussed. The emergent application horizon of piezoelectric energy harvesters particularly for wireless devices and self-powered sensors is highlighted, and the current challenges and future prospects are critically discussed.

Piezoelectric Materials for Energy Harvesting and Sensing Applications: Roadmap for Future Smart Materials

The impact of Internet of Things has been revolutionized in all fields of life, but its impact on the healthcare system has been significant due to its cutting edge transition. The role of Internet of Things becomes more dominant when it is supported by the features of mobile computing. The mobile computing extends the functionality of IoT in healthcare environment by bringing a massive support in the form of mobile health (m-health). In this research, a systematic literature review protocol is proposed to study how mobile computing assists IoT applications in healthcare, contributes to the current and future research work of IoT in the healthcare system, brings privacy and security in health IoT devices, and affects the IoT in the healthcare system. Furthermore, the intentions of the paper are to study the impacts of mobile computing on IoT in healthcare environment or smart hospitals in light of our systematic literature review protocol. The proposed study reports the papers that were included based on filtering process by title, abstract, and contents, and a total of 116 primary studies were included to support the proposed research. These papers were then analysed for research questions defined for the proposed study.

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Internet of Things for Healthcare Using Effects of Mobile Computing: A Systematic Literature Review

The advancement and popularity of smartphones have made it an essential and all-purpose device. But lack of advancement in battery technology has held back its optimum potential. Therefore, considering its scarcity, optimal use and efficient management of energy are crucial in a smartphone. For that, a fair understanding of a smartphone’s energy consumption factors is necessary for both users and device manufacturers, along with other stakeholders in the smartphone ecosystem. It is important to assess how much of the device’s energy is consumed by which components and under what circumstances. This paper provides a generalized, but detailed analysis of the power consumption causes (internal and external) of a smartphone and also offers suggestive measures to minimize the consumption for each factor. The main contribution of this paper is four comprehensive literature reviews on: 1) smartphone’s power consumption assessment and estimation (including power consumption analysis and modelling); 2) power consumption management for smartphones (including energy-saving methods and techniques); 3) state-of-the-art of the research and commercial developments of smartphone batteries (including alternative power sources); and 4) mitigating the hazardous issues of smartphones’ batteries (with a details explanation of the issues). The research works are further subcategorized based on different research and solution approaches. A good number of recent empirical research works are considered for this comprehensive review, and each of them is succinctly analysed and discussed.

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Power Consumption Analysis, Measurement, Management, and Issues: A State-of-the-Art Review of Smartphone Battery and Energy Usage

Friction stir additive manufacturing (FSAM) method is one of the growing techniques of additive manufacturing that utilizes the concept of solid state friction stir processing to develop multilayer components through layer by layer joining. The present work aims to highlight the working principle and the past research work carried out by the various authors that utilize FSAM as a fabrication process. Based on the available experimental data, the summary of additive based friction stir processes, type of machine for fabrication, materials, process parameters taken for the study is also discussed in detail. Mechanical properties such as grain refinement, microhardness variation, and tensile strength are also summarized, in comparison with their base materials. In addition, the current scenario and future scope of the FSAM process are also discussed in detail in terms of its utilization in various sectors of engineering along with estimated future trends.

Friction stir additive manufacturing – An innovative tool to enhance mechanical and microstructural properties

Healthcare sector is probably the most benefited from the applications of nanotechnology. The nanotechnology, in the forms of nanomedicine, nanoimplants, nanobiosensors along with the internet of nano things (IoNT), has the potential to bring a revolutionizing advancement in the field of medicine and healthcare services. The primary aim of this paper is to explore the clinical and medical possibilities of these different implementations of nanotechnology. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of nanotechnology, biosensors, nanobiosensors, and IoNT. Furthermore, multilevel taxonomies of nanotechnology, nanoparticles, biosensors, nanobiosensors, and nanozymes are presented. The potential medical and clinical applications of these technologies are discussed in details with several examples. This paper specifically focuses on IoNT and its role in healthcare. In addition to describing a general architecture of IoNT for healthcare, the communication architecture of the IoNT is also explained. The challenges in the successful realization of IoNT are also discussed critically, along with a special discussion on internet of bio-nano things (IoBNT) and its potential in making IoNT more compatible to human body.

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Advancing Modern Healthcare With Nanotechnology, Nanobiosensors, and Internet of Nano Things: Taxonomies, Applications, Architecture, and Challenges

Modern wireless communication systems have witnessed increasing use of channel coding techniques to enhance the throughput and to reduce latency. Interleavers are playing an important role to make the communication systems more robust and resilient in such channel coding approaches. The Long-Term Evolution (LTE)/LTE-Advanced of the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) uses Quadrature Permutation Polynomial (QPP) interleaver in its Turbo coding scheme. The address generator of the interleaver contains a quadratic expression having square and modulus function whose direct digital hardware is not yet available in the literature. A novel algorithm has now been proposed which can provide low complexity hardware solution to implement the interleaver address generator. This paper describes VHDL model and timing simulation of the proposed address generator using ModelSim XE-III software. Due to absence of implementation results in the literature, comparison of this work is made by implementing conventional LUT-based technique on the same FPGA. Such comparison shows better FPGA resource utilization by 71.16% and improved operating speed by 82.26% in favour of the novel proposed technique.

Design of FPGA-Based QPP Interleaver for LTE/LTE-Advanced Application

Demand for high-speed wireless broadband internet service is ever increasing. Multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) Wireless LAN (WLAN) is becoming a promising solution for such high-speed internet service requirements. This paper proposes a novel algorithm to efficiently model the address generation circuitry of the MIMO WLAN interleaver. The interleaver used in the MIMO WLAN transceiver has three permutation steps involving floor function whose hardware implementation is the most challenging task due to the absence of corresponding digital hardware. In this work, we propose an algorithm with a mathematical background for the address generator, eliminating the need for floor function. The algorithm is converted into digital hardware for implementation on the reconfigurable FPGA platform. Hardware structure for the complete interleaver, including the read address generator and memory module, is designed and modeled in VHDL using Xilinx Integrated Software Environment (ISE) utilizing embedded memory and DSP blocks of Spartan 6 FPGA. The functionality of the proposed algorithm is verified through exhaustive software simulation using ModelSim software. Hardware testing is carried out on Zynq 7000 FPGA using Virtual Input Output (VIO) and Integrated Logic Analyzer (ILA) core. Comparisons with few recent similar works, including the conventional Look-Up Table (LUT) based technique, show the superiority of our proposed design in terms of maximum improvement in operating frequency by 196.83%, maximum reduction in power consumption by 74.27%, and reduction of memory occupancy by 88.9%. In the case of throughput, our design can deliver 8.35 times higher compared to IEEE 802.11n requirement.

High throughput resource efficient reconfigurable interleaver for MIMO WLAN application.

Technology aims to ease human life, helps to do the daily work with minimal effort. This become more important for the humans with disability such as visually impaired people. Visually impaired people face various difficulties to perform their day to day routine work unlike people with good vision. In this paper, an effort has been made to help visually impaired people by developing an electronic walking assistant to make their life easier. The proposed system consists of a Raspberry pi board, three ultrasonic sensors and a wet floor sensor embedded in a walking stick which helps the visually impaired person to walk without a live companion and guides during navigation. The ultrasonic sensors are used to detect obstacles if any in the path of the user and also to find any surface unevenness such as potholes and bumps, to avoid any kind of incident. A water detection module is designed and attached to the lower end of the stick to detect the wet surface. To alert the user about hindrances ahead of him/her, a buzzer and a vibration motor are attached to the stick. Test results of successful implementation of the device are also presented in detail. Error analysis and comparative study with other similar works have also been presented.

Bijoy Kumar Upadhyaya

Papers

Design of FPGA-Based QPP Interleaver for LTE/LTE-Advanced Application

High throughput resource efficient reconfigurable interleaver for MIMO WLAN application.

Design of a Raspberry Pi Based Electronic Travel Assistant for Visually Impaired Persons