Publications by authors named "Francesco Rizzi"

Continuous monitoring of cardiovascular parameters like pulse wave velocity (PWV), blood pressure wave (BPW), stiffness index (SI), reflection index (RI), mean arterial pressure (MAP), and cardio-ankle vascular index (CAVI) has significant clinical importance for the early diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). Standard approaches, including echocardiography, impedance cardiography, or hemodynamic monitoring, are hindered by expensive and bulky apparatus and accessibility only in specialized facilities. Moreover, noninvasive techniques like sphygmomanometry, electrocardiography, and arterial tonometry often lack accuracy due to external electrical interferences, artifacts produced by unreliable electrode contacts, misreading from placement errors, or failure in detecting transient issues and trends.

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Sensing systems are becoming less and less invasive. In this context, flexible materials offer new opportunities that are impossible to achieve with bulky and rigid chips. Standard silicon sensors cannot be adapted to curved shapes and are susceptible to big deformations, thus discouraging their use in wearable applications.

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Advances in wearable device technology pave the way for wireless health monitoring for medical and non-medical applications. In this work, we present a wearable heart rate monitoring platform communicating in the sub-6GHz 5G ISM band. The proposed device is composed of an Aluminium Nitride (AlN) piezoelectric sensor, a patch antenna, and a custom printed circuit board (PCB) for data acquisition and transmission.

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Metabolic disorders such as the highly prevalent disease diabetes require constant monitoring. The health status of patients is linked to glucose levels in blood, which are typically measured invasively, but can also be correlated to other body fluids such as sweat. Aiming at a reliable glucose biosensor, an enzymatic sensing layer was fabricated on flexible polystyrene foil, for which a versatile nanoimprinting process for microfluidics was presented.

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In this work, a new flexible and biocompatible microfluidic pH sensor based on surface acoustic waves (SAWs) is presented. The device consists of polyethylene naphthalate (PEN) as a flexible substrate on which aluminum nitride (AlN) has been deposited as a piezoelectric material. The fabrication of suitable interdigitated transducers (IDTs) generates Lamb waves (L-SAW) with a center frequency ≈500 MHz traveling in the active region.

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Deglutition disorders (dysphagia) are common symptoms of a large number of diseases and can lead to severe deterioration of the patient's quality of life. The clinical evaluation of this problem involves an invasive screening, whose results are subjective and do not provide a precise and quantitative assessment. To overcome these issues, alternative possibilities based on wearable technologies have been proposed.

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Soft compliant strain gauges are key devices for wearable applications such as body health sensor systems, exoskeletons, or robotics. Other than traditional piezoresistive materials, such as metals and doped semiconductors placed on strain-sensitive microsystems, a class of soft porous materials with exotic mechanical properties, called auxetics, can be employed in strain gauges in order to boost their performance and add functionalities. For strain electronic read-outs, their polymeric structure needs to be made conductive.

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Over the last decades, great effort has gone into developing new biosensor technologies for applications in different fields such as disease diagnosis and detection of pollutants in water and food. Global developments in robotic, IoT technologies and in healthcare sensors require new flexible sensor technologies that are low cost and built from sustainable and reusable or recyclable materials. One of the most promising technologies is based on the development of surface acoustic wave (SAW) flexible biosensors, which are highly reproducible, reliable and wirelessly controllable.

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Preparation for reuse (PfR) is a fundamental waste management practice that is second only to prevention in the waste hierarchy. The paper, building on advertising literature, investigates how to leverage the pro-social nature of this option for giving products that have become waste a second life. To examine how advertising strategies based on emotional, functional or combined stimuli can be used to increase intention to buy these items, we carried out an experiment on 507 actual visitors a PfR items shop run by a social cooperative in Northern Italy.

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In this paper, the design, fabrication and mechanical characterization of a novel polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) soft probe for delivering and sensing forces in biological systems is proposed. On the basis of preliminary finite element (FEM) analysis, the design takes advantage of a suitable core geometry, characterized by a variable spring-like ring. The compliance of probes can be finely set in a wide range to measure forces in the micronewton to nanonewton range.

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Flow stimuli in the natural world are varied and contain a wide variety of directional information. Nature has developed morphological polarity and bidirectional arrangements for flow sensing to filter the incoming stimuli. Inspired by the neuromasts found in the lateral line of fish, we present a novel flow sensor design based on two curved cantilevers with bending orientation antiparallel to each other.

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Cells are highly dynamic elements, continuously interacting with the extracellular environment. Mechanical forces sensed and applied by cells are responsible for cellular adhesion, motility, and deformation, and are heavily involved in determining cancer spreading and metastasis formation. Cell/extracellular matrix interactions are commonly analyzed with the use of hydrogels and 3D microfabricated scaffolds.

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Objective: The aim of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of cognitive rehabilitation in a group of multiple sclerosis (MS) patients.

Methods: Thirty-four patients were included in this study and randomly allocated either to treatment with multidisciplinary rehabilitation plus cognitive training or to treatment with multidisciplinary rehabilitation alone.

Results: After 3 months of cognitive treatment, the patients assigned to the rehabilitation plus cognitive training group displayed an improvement in the cognitive test of executive function and a marked improvement in quality of life (QoL).

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The response to different force load ranges and actuation at low energies is of considerable interest for applications of compliant and flexible devices undergoing large deformations. We present a review of technological platforms based on nitride materials (aluminum nitride and silicon nitride) for the microfabrication of a class of flexible micro-electro-mechanical systems. The approach exploits the material stress differences among the constituent layers of nitride-based (AlN/Mo, Si x N y /Si and AlN/polyimide) mechanical elements in order to create microstructures, such as upwardly-bent cantilever beams and bowed circular membranes.

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Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) has been the backbone of product life cycle management in Europe since the 2000s. Unfortunately, EPR implementation has multiple impacts on the supply chain and, thus, its consequences are not always easily manageable. Although several studies have explored various examples within the EU, the determinants of the effectiveness of EPR management are still not fully understood.

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Parylene C is a polymer well-known for its inertness and chemical resistance, thus ideal for covering and sealing 3D substrates and structures by conformal coating. In the present study, the Parylene C surface is modified by functionalization with pH-responsive poly(methacrylic acid) microgels either over the whole surface, or in a pattern through a poly(dimethylsiloxane) stamp. The surface functionalization consists of two phases: first, an oxygen plasma treatment is used to make the surface superhydrophilic, inducing the formation of polar functional groups and surface topography modifications; then, the plasma-treated samples are functionalized by drop casting a solution of pH-responsive microgels, or in a pattern via microcontact printing of the same solution.

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