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Taste (gustatory) and smell (olfactory) are two of the five human senses apart from touch (somatosensory), vision and hearing (auditory). In human and many other vertebrate animals the sense of taste are often used with the sense of smell, and perceived by the brain as flavour. There have been a few attempts in combining the responses of different types of electronic sensory systems, and these are performed using data fusion. However, the fusion is based on separate systems. Presented here is the development of a hybrid system combining an electronic nose and tongue. Both sub-systems were developed using off-the-shelf components and rapid prototyping techniques. Both sub-systems consist of an array of gas sensors and taste sensors with different selectivity patterns, a signal-collecting unit and pattern recognition software applied to a computer. The principle is based on the fact that a large number of different compounds contribute to defining a measured smell and liquid samples; the sensor array of provide an output pattern that represents a combination of all the components. The system uses qualitative analysis which as same as human sensory system. The initial tests on differentiating four types of teas have shown that multiplemodality systems perform better than those with single modality.

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Microneedle is an example of Transdermal drug delivery (TTD) device. It is known for eliminating pain and inconvenient intravenous injections. This study presents a work on design microneedle and optimize the designs using Genetic Algorithm (GA). At first, a few solid microneedles are designed with difference parameters, and the considered parameters involve are shape of the needle, materials, size of array, base of microneedle, height of microneedle and number of needles on the microneedle’s array base. The microneedle is designed to meet the output requirement which are the total deformation and equivalent stress. Pressure on the tip and size of microneedle base are set to be constant which are 3.18 MPa and 2500 μm × 2500 μm × 50 μm, respectively. Then, optimisation process is conducted on the designs using Genetic Algorithm. Based on the optimisation results, it showed that the optimum structure for the studied microneedles is canonical type, diameter and needle height are 500 μm and 500 μm, respectively, PVA material and involve with 3 number of needles. The results showed that GA is capable to achieve the output requirement and able to optimize the parameter of the microneedle structure.

Localisation is essential for autonomous mobile robot system enabling it to locate itself within its environment. One method to perform localisation is to use scan matching with iteration closest point (ICP) algorithm. However, typical ICP may be prone to inaccuracies in localisation and mapping due to problems associated with laser range data limitation such as overshoot data and blank data. This paper presents the improvement to the above problem by the inclusion of a threshold to the KNN scan matching algorithm during iteration process. The threshold is a percentage of nearest point of incoming input with respected to reference point. Threshold values of 0%, 70% and 90% were tested, and improvements of the classification performance were observed with the increase in the threshold values, with the latter achieving 100% accuracy. This work shows that the use of threshold in scan matching may improve the accuracy of local map classification.

Microneedle is known as transdermal drug delivery (TDD) devices that uses to deliver biological fluid into veins and needle that use to tear skin to collect blood sample. It involves with various parameters and designs. This device gain attention as its benefit can eliminate pain and more convenient compared to intravenous injection due to its micron size. Typically, microneedle is fabricated using MEMS technology. However, this technology requires few processes such as deposition, etching and moulding, as well as consume much times. This paper presents a work of design and fabrication of solid microneedle using 3D rapid prototype printing. A few types of microneedles are designed and they are analysed in terms of stress and force characteristics. Also, it will study the ability of a few materials to withstand stress while force exerted on it. The selected materials are polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), polylactic acid (PLA), polyester resin and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS). The results show that PVA has the highest ability to withstand force compared other materials. As conclusion, the design and fabrication of microneedle using 3D rapid prototyping printer is succeed using PVA material and real post-analysis can be conducted to test the capability for medical practice.