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In this work, we study ultra-short term (UST) complexity of Heart Rate Variability (HRV) and its agreement with analysis of standard short-term (ST) HRV recordings obtained at rest and during orthostatic stress. Conditional Entropy (CE) measures have been computed using both a linear Gaussian approximation and a more accurate model-free approach based on nearest neighbors. The agreement between UST and ST indices has been compared via statistical tests and correlation analysis, suggesting the feasibility of exploiting faster algorithms and shorter time series for detecting changes in cardiovascular control during various states.

The growing attention towards healthcare and the constant technological innovations in the field of semiconductor components have allowed a widespread availability of smaller devices, suitable to be worn and able to continuously acquire physiological signals. Wearable devices are, however, more prone to yield signals corrupted by artifacts caused by movement. This issue is particularly relevant in photoplethysmographic (PPG) applications where also, to exploit the whole dynamic range of the acquisition device, the DC component of the signal should be removed and the AC component amplified. In this context, we have designed and realized an analog front-end (AFE) suitable to be integrated within PPG wearable devices able to minimize these problems by reducing the ambient light and the factors that can vary the average value of the current output from a silicon photomultiplier in a PPG system using a green LED. DC component elimination is pursued by a signal conditioning circuit realized by the design and the implementation of a transimpedance amplifier and a Miller integrator capable of following and subsequently subtracting the average value of the acquired signal, so as to obtain an output signal that fluctuates around zero. The step response of the feedback circuit was studied carrying out a PPG acquisition on wrist with promising preliminary results.

Nowadays, the ever-growing interest to health and quality of life of individuals and the advancements in electronic devices technology are pushing the development of portable and wearable biomedical devices able to pursue a minimally invasive monitoring of physiological parameters in daily-life conditions. Such devices can now carry out a real-time assessment of the subjects’ overall health status and possibly even detect ongoing diseases. In this context, we have designed and implemented a multisensor portable system able to perform synchronous real-time acquisitions of electrocardiographic (ECG), photoplethysmographic (PPG) and airflow breathing signals. We investigated cardiorespiratory interactions between heart period and respiratory time series, extracted from combined ECG and breathing signals (considered as the reference), or using the PPG signal only, through Granger Causality measures in time and frequency domain. The aim was to assess to what extent the non-invasive and cost-effective PPG technique can be employed alone to assess cardiorespiratory interactions, thus avoiding the simultaneous acquisitions of ECG or breathing signals with more bulky or uncomfortable devices. The analysis was carried out on 6 healthy young subjects, undergoing a two-phase protocol consisting in spontaneous and controlled breathing phases. Our findings show that linear interactions measures behave similarly if ECG or PPG are used for detecting the heart period and sampling the airflow respiratory signal, while the utilization of a respiratory signal extracted through filtering or as the envelope of the PPG waveform could lead to causality underestimates and must be further investigated.

In recent years, the attention to the health and comfort of the individual, together with the electronic miniaturization progress, have led to an increased interest in the development of biomedical devices that are able to acquire a multitude of biomedical signals. Such devices should be wearable and comfortable during daily use, to be thus suitable for continuously monitoring psychophysical health states. In this context, we have designed and realized a portable biomedical device capable of real-time acquisition of electrocardiographic (ECG), photoplethysmographic (PPG), breathing and galvanic skin response (GSR) signals, for a noninvasive monitoring of multiple physiological parameters. This work shows the architecture of our system, which integrates a Bluetooth module for wireless communication with the central computer and novel analog sensors capable of carrying out breathing and GSR measurements. Preliminary measurements carried out using our system during a controlled breathing protocol illustrated how the simultaneous measurement of ECG, PPG, GSR and respiration allows tracking changes not only in heart rate, but also in epidermal tissue sweating, thus confirming that the device can be successfully employed for monitoring health status and, in perspective, also for assessing the individual’s stress level.

In this work, partial information decomposition (PID) was applied to the time series of heart rate and EEG amplitude variability to investigate the dynamical interactions in brain-heart coupling before and after epileptic seizures. From ECG and EEG signals collected on 23 children suffering from focal epilepsy, the RR intervals and the EEG variance at ipsilateral and contralateral temporal electrodes were computed in four different time windows before and after the seizures. Static PID was used to obtain redundant, unique and synergistic components of the total information shared between the series of RR and EEG variance. Results highlight, in the progression from preictal to postictal states, a statistically significant change of mutual information at the ipsilateral electrode and of the synergy between brain locations.

The human body can be seen as a functional network depicting the dynamical interactions between different organ systems. This exchange of information is often evaluated with information-theoretic approaches which comprise the use of vector autoregressive (VAR) and state space (SS) models, normally identified with the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS). However, the number of time series to be included in the model is strictly related to the length of data recorded thus limiting the use of the classical approach. In this work, a new method based on penalized regressions, the so-called LASSO, was compared with OLS on physiological time-series extracted from 18 subjects during different stress conditions. Results show similarities between the brain-body interactions estimated by both methodologies, highlighting a greater intepretability of patterns estimated with LASSO especially in the subnetwork of brain-brain interactions.

The recent advances in multiparametric monitoring of biosignals and management of big data prompt for the development of devices and techniques for the extraction of indicators with physiological relevance. In this context, we have designed and realized a portable electronic system, equipped with simple biomedical sensors, able to synchronously record multiple electrocardiographic (ECG), photoplethysmographic (PPG) and breathing signals, for carrying out a non-invasive monitoring of several cardiovascular parameters. In this work, we show the results of preliminary measurements performed following a specific physiological protocol (i.e., deep breathing with 10 s per cycle). The system allows to monitor specific physiological behaviors, such as the decrease of the R-R interval (increase of the heart rate) during inhalation and the increase of the stroke volume increases during exhalation. The high quality of the ECG/PPG/breath waveforms acquired by our probes, sensors and system allows an improvement in the accuracy of the extraction of noteworthy cardiovascular parameters.

In this work, we investigate the possibility of employing graphene field effect transistors, specifically designed for microwave applications, as infrared detectors for telecom applications. Our devices have been fabricated on a sapphire substrate employing CVD-grown transferred graphene. The roles of both the gate dielectric and the DC bias conditions have been evaluated in order to maximize the infrared generated signal through an experimental investigation of the signal-to-noise ratio dependence on the transistor operating point.

In this paper, we present a low cost prototype of a Time-Of-Flight (TOF) LiDAR system, employing a SiPM as photo detector and MEMS mirrors in order to steer the nanosecond pulsed optical beam with a scanning angle of +/-6°. Preliminary TOF measurements have been performed both indoor and outdoor to test the limits of the system.

In this work, an electronic portable combo system able to synchronously acquire multiple signals, e.g. electrocardiographic (ECG), photoplethysmographic (PPG) and breathing waveforms, is presented. The realized system is also capable of showing in real time some physiological parameters which can be used for assessing health/stress status of the volunteer, such as heart rate and breathing frequency and their trends over time. Thanks to the use of non-invasive PPG probes, of batteries as power supply, and to the possibility to add in the future additional sensors to acquire other signals, the system could also be employed inside vehicles for assessing the status of the driver. Finally, the results of simultaneous acquisition of ECG and PPG signals are presented, also comparing, in terms of speed and accuracy, different algorithms to obtain the pulse-pulse interval for calculating the heart rate and the heart rate variability.

In this work, we present the feasibility to use a simpler methodological approach for the assessment of the short-term complexity of Heart Rate Variability (HRV). Specifically, we propose to exploit Pulse Rate Variability (PRV) recorded through photoplethysmography in place of HRV measured from the ECG, and to compute complexity via a linear Gaussian approximation in place of the standard model-free methods (e.g., nearest neighbor entropy estimates) usually applied to HRV. Linear PRV-based and model-free HRV-based complexity measures were compared via statistical tests, correlation analysis and Bland-Altman plots, demonstrating an overall good agreement. These results support the applicability of the simpler proposed approach, which is faster and easier-to-implement, making our approach eligible for portable/wearable devices and thus broadening the out-of-lab accessibility of autonomic indexes.

This paper presents the performance comparison of PV windows with the purpose of tracing the behavior of next-generation systems, which could favor architectonical integration. More in detail, a dye sensitized solar cell (DSSC) and blue and grey thin film silicon panels have been analyzed. The systems can be placed behind a window or behind a wall of glass blocks. The three generation systems are then compared in terms of both efficiency and Fill Factor.

In this article the preliminary evaluation of the performance of a photovoltaic window is presented. The aim is to trace the behavior of next-generation systems, which favor architectonical integration. Three different systems have been taken into account: a dye sensitized solar cell (DSSC), blue and grey caved silicon panels. The systems can be placed behind a window or behind a wall of glass blocks.

This paper presents the electrical characterization of low power CIGSSe photovoltaic (PV) modules. Such investigation is achieved to perform a comparison of their performances with conventional silicon PV modules. For this purpose, a test bench, suitable for the characterization of both traditional and innovative low power modules, has been set-up and experimental results are accurately described and discussed.

In this manuscript, a Geostationary satellite-toground Free Space Optics (FSO) downlink channel model has been implemented, which is able to predict temporal irradiance fluctuations caused by scintillation at a wide range of turbulence conditions and for different values of the zenith angle. In order to mitigate fading events that occur in FSO communications, we have also tested the performance of three different families of Rateless Codes (Luby Transform, Raptor and RaptorQ) into our model and found that RaptorQ is the best candidate to mitigate errors in FSO links. Keywords— Optical Wireless Communications; Space-toGround FSO links, time-series, rateless codes; fading mitigation

In this work, we have designed and implemented a microcontroller-based embedded system for blood pressure monitoring through a PhotoPlethysmoGraphic (PPG) technique. In our system, it is possible to perform PPG measurements via reflectance mode. Hardware novelty of our system consists in the adoption of Silicon PhotoMultiplier detectors. The signal received from the photodetector is used to calculate the instantaneous heart rate and therefore the heart rate variability. The obtained results show that, by using our system, it is possible to easily extract both the PPG and the breath signal. These signals can be used to monitor the patients during the convalescence both in hospital and at home.

A design and implementation of a portable functional Near InfraRed Spectroscopy embedded system prototype is described. In this theoretical and experimental work, we present an embedded system hosting 64 LED sources and 128 Silicon PhotoMultiplier detectors (SiPM). The elementary part of the structure is a flexible probe “leaf” consisting of 16 SiPMs, 4 couples of LEDs, each operating at two wavelengths, and a temperature sensor. The hardware system is based on an ARM main microcontroller that allows to perform both the switching time of LEDs and the acquisition of the SiPM outputs. The performed preliminary experimental tests achieved very promising results, thus demonstrating the effectiveness of our fNIRS system.

Free Space Optics (FSO) systems present some important advantages if compared to Radio Frequency links, but they can be affected by several impairments that degrade the link quality and availability. In particular, due to temporary interruptions of the line-of-sight condition between the transmitter and the receiver, packet loss can occur during data transmission. In this work, we present an indoor Free Space Optics link, in which we have systematically generated interruptions of the beam. We demonstrate how the application of the most recent rateless codes, i.e., RaptorQ codes, can strongly improve the link quality by reducing packet loss. In particular, results show that the Packet Error Rate greatly decreases when employing RaptorQ codes. Finally, by choosing the most suitable encoding/decoding parameters, we can correctly recover all the lost packets, ensuring an error-free operation.

In this work, we are reporting results on the electrodeposition of the CuInSe 2 thin films on molybdenum thin foil substrates. We have used an aqueous non-buffered electrolyte and a careful choice of deposition parameters to ensure a good quality and composition of the deposited films. In addition, CdS was replaced in the buffer layer with a wider bandgap Zn(S,O,OH) film obtained by chemical bath deposition. The deposited films were annealed in inert atmosphere at different temperatures. The influence of annealing temperature on the properties of the films is briefly discussed. Films were also characterized by photoelectrochemical and I-V measurements. Structural characterization was carried out by XRD and Raman spectroscopy. Results show the growth of good quality films with very uniform morphology and good chemical composition.

We report on the design and the electro-optical characterization of new classes of 4H-SiC Schottky UV detectors, fabricated employing Ni 2 Si interdigitated strips. We have measured, in dark conditions, the forward and reverse I-V characteristics as a function of temperature and C-V characteristics. Responsivity measurements of the devices, as function of wavelength in the UV range, of package temperature and of applied reverse bias are reported. We also compared devices featuring different strip pitch sizes, discussing their performances, and found the device exhibiting best results.

We describe our approach to the task of modelling, both at single cell structure and complete module levels, during the solar cell technology development process. This can give very helpful indications, in terms of global photovoltaic module characteristics, for the assessment of intermediate research results and planning of further experiments. We make reference specifically to the fabrication of thin film CIGS solar cells by means of single-step electrodeposition, a technique which appears fairly easy and low-cost but, at the same time, can lead to quite different structural and electrical properties.

A highly localized THz source is a promising candidate for sub-wavelength microscopy, due to its superior radiation power throughput with respect to others near-field techniques. Here, we report on the spatial and the spectral near-field properties of our highly localized THz source.

In this paper, the authors present the latest results on a simple and low cost method to achieve a dynamic and flexible network monitoring. By placing several fiber Bragg gratings (FBG) along the passive optical gigabit Ethernet infrastructure (GePON), the proposed modified optical time domain reflectometer (OTDR) is able to monitor the entire system by simply tuning its working wavelength. Furthermore, the optical network terminals (ONT), at the end users premises, have been interconnected to the trunk via an innovative cable able to both carry the optical signal as well as the power supply.

First experiments of proton exchange channel waveguides compatible with electric field surface periodic poling of congruent lithium niobate crystals are addressed. Picosecond nonlinear copropagating QPM-SHG measurements have been carried out on such structures.

The need to reduce CO2 emissions leads the field of research to find the most suitable solutions to combat this phenomenon. The main solution is represented by the replacement of internal combustion engine vehicles with electric ones unitedly to the realization of microgrids for the urban vehicles charging. In this paper, the energy demand of a node of the proposed Urban Charging Infrastructure (UCI) is estimated through the determination of pre-defined shuttle bus loop routes. In addition, a criterion for the sizing of Supercapacitors (SCs) bank used as on-board storage is provided. Finally, simulation and experimental results are compared.

Wide Band Gap (WBG) semiconductors are increasingly addressed towards Electric Vehicle (EV) applications, due to their significant advantages in terms of high-voltage and low-losses performances, suitable for high power applications. Nevertheless, the packaging in WBG devices represents a challenge for designers due to the notable impact that inductive and capacitive parasitic components can bring in high switching frequency regime in terms of noise and power losses. In this paper, a comparison between conventional Silicon (Si) and emerging Silicon-Carbide (SiC) power switching devices is presented. The effects of inductive parasitic effects and switching frequency are investigated in simulation on a typical switching circuit and power losses are compared as well. Experimental results concerning a SiC-based circuit are shown and investigated in a preliminary printed circuit board (PCB).

In this paper, a preliminary PCB board for the electromagnetic interference (EMI) characterization of innovative silicon-carbide (SiC) based switching devices is presented. Packaging technological issues can determine hurdles in the high-frequency switching and high power regime where wide band gap semiconductors are intended today for Electric Vehicle (EV) applications. In particular, the parasitic inductances that emerge in such devices, must be assessed, by using e.g. EMI techniques. In this specific case, the EMI characterization is supposed to be carried out in a semi-anechoic chamber, available at the University of Palermo (UNIPA), to assess the electromagnetic disturbances according to the levels of compliance indicated by the standards. The proposed prototype can work properly at the following levels of voltage, frequency and load power: 28.5 V, 2 MHz and 40 W. Details concerning the layout design and the prototype manufacturing are discussed.