Design007 Magazine

Design007-Sept2019

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SEPTEMBER 2019 I DESIGN007 MAGAZINE 107 boats," and that the standard will serve that purpose by addressing the prospective prob- lems each company might face if the standard did not exist. Standards bodies that oversee such devel- opments generally serve members by forming committees to work out the details. The task can be arduous and take months or even years to come to a consensus by a vote among users of the standard. To gain approval could require anything from a simple majority to a 75% or even greater approval level before gaining ac- ceptance. Interestingly—or perhaps, unfortu- nately—because of the rapid changes being experienced by the electronics industry on a seemingly daily basis, the approval of a stan- dard is often marked by the beginning of a re- vision process to capture those changes. Summary Standards (and guidelines) are important documents that are required by almost every industry imaginable to maintain a sense of or- der and ensure that the quality, performance, safety, and reliability of products meet custom- er expectations. Metaphorically, standards tru- ly are industrial-strength glue. FLEX007 Joe Fjelstad is founder and CEO of Verdant Electronics and an inter- national authority and innovator in the field of electronic interconnection and packaging technologies with more than 150 patents issued or pending. To read past columns or contact Fjelstad, click here. A team of scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, is developing wearable skin sensors that can detect what's in your sweat. They hope that one day, monitoring perspiration could bypass the need for more invasive procedures, such as blood draws, and provide re- al-time updates on health problems, such as dehydration or fatigue. According to Ali Javey, a professor of electrical engineer- ing and computer science at UC Berkeley and senior author on the paper, the goal of the project is "'decoding" sweat composition. They used the sensors to monitor the sweat rate and electrolytes and metabolites in sweat. The new sensors contain a spiraling microscopic tube, or microflu - idic, that wicks sweat from the skin. By tracking how fast the sweat moves through the microfluidic, the sensors can report how much a person is sweating, or their sweat rate. Javey and his team worked with researchers at the VTT Technical Research Center of Finland to develop a way to quickly manufacture the sensor patches in a roll-to-roll processing technique similar to screen printing. To bet- ter understand what sweat can say about the real-time health of the human body, the researchers first placed the sweat sensors on different spots on volunteers' bodies and measured their sweat rates and the sodium and po- tassium levels in their sweat while they rode on an exer- cise bike. They found that local sweat rate could indicate the body's overall liquid loss during exercise, meaning that tracking sweat rate might be a way to give athletes a heads up when they may be pushing themselves too hard. (Source: UC Berkeley) Wearable Sensors Detect What's in Your Sweat

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