This paper presents an overview of semiconductor materials used in gas sensors, their technology, design, and application. Semiconductor materials include metal oxides, conducting polymers, carbon nanotubes, and 2D materials. Metal oxides are most often the first choice due to their ease of fabrication, low cost, high sensitivity, and stability. Some of their disadvantages are low selectivity and high operating temperature. Conducting polymers have the advantage of a low operating temperature and can detect many organic vapors. They are flexible but affected by humidity. Carbon nanotubes are chemically and mechanically stable and are sensitive towards NO and NH3, but need dopants or modifications to sense other gases. Graphene, transition metal chalcogenides, boron nitride, transition metal carbides/nitrides, metal organic frameworks, and metal oxide nanosheets as 2D materials represent gas-sensing materials of the future, especially in medical devices, such as breath sensing. This overview covers the most used semiconducting materials in gas sensing, their synthesis methods and morphology, especially oxide nanostructures, heterostructures, and 2D materials, as well as sensor technology and design, application in advance electronic circuits and systems, and research challenges from the perspective of emerging technologies.

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Wireless sensor network applications range from industrial automation and control, agricultural and environmental protection, to surveillance and medicine. In most applications, data are highly sensitive and must be protected from any type of attack and abuse. Security challenges in wireless sensor networks are mainly defined by the power and computing resources of sensor devices, memory size, quality of radio channels and susceptibility to physical capture. In this article, an embedded sensor node microcontroller designed to support sensor network applications with severe security demands is presented. It features a low power 16-bitprocessor core supported by a number of hardware accelerators designed to perform complex operations required by advanced crypto algorithms. The microcontroller integrates an embedded Flash and an 8-channel 12-bit analog-to-digital converter making it a good solution for low-power sensor nodes. The article discusses the most important security topics in wireless sensor networks and presents the architecture of the proposed hardware solution. Furthermore, it gives details on the chip implementation, verification and hardware evaluation. Finally, the chip power dissipation and performance figures are estimated and analyzed.

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Internet of Things (IoT) applied in healthcare system has a huge potential to improve patients' quality of life. Representing network of devices embedded with electronics and sensors, IoT enables constant monitoring of vital body functions, tracking of physical activities of a person and aids rehab physical therapy. Such an IoT-based system would allow standalone recovery process, minimizing the need for dedicated medical personnel and could be used in both hospital and home conditions. In this paper, we present a telerehabilitation system that uses wearable muscle sensor and Microsoft Kinect to create interactive personalized physical therapy that can be carried out at home. Early experiments and results of pilot implementation validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed IoT-enabled telerehabilitation system.

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A novel compact dual-band bandpass waveguide filter is presented in this paper. H-plane metal inserts with complementary split-ring resonators are implemented as resonating elements in the standard (WR-90) rectangular waveguide. Design starts from the models of the waveguide resonators with two resonant frequencies (9[Formula: see text]GHz and 11[Formula: see text]GHz) using a single flat or folded metal insert. Further, folded inserts are used for the second-order dual-band filter design. The equivalent circuits are proposed for the considered waveguide resonators and filter. A good agreement of the amplitude responses obtained for three-dimensional electromagnetic models and microwave circuits is achieved. Finally, compact dual-band bandpass waveguide filter is proposed as a novel solution using miniaturized inverters for both central frequencies. Compact filter model is further modified in order to obtain solution customized for easier fabrication. For the compact filter model, amplitude response is experimentally verified. The required filter response is preserved, as verified by a good agreement of the results obtained for the original dual-band filter and for the compact filter solutions.

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