Structured assessments of PD lack quantitative measures of functional impairment, remaining highly subjective and variable. Clinicians involved in the long-term management of PD would benefit from a quantitative method to assess patient impairment in the home. To investigate this, nine-axis inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensors were attached to implements used in basic activities of daily living (ADLs), namely brushes and combs. Continuous time-series accelerometer and gyroscope data was collected while people with Parkinson’s Disease (pwPD) performed brushing and combing ADLs. Harnessing temporal and spectral features extracted from time-series data, a linear regression model with L2 regularization achieved a moderately high correlation with patient total score on the Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale. Additionally, a decision tree machine learning model (XGBoost) trained on signal features accurately performed a classification task, separating participants into healthy control, mild severity PD, and moderate severity PD classes with ~84-88%% accuracy on a held-out test set. Due to the relationship between the patient’s rated severity and features captured by the IMU sensor, this approach has potential use in more objectively characterizing patient functionality longitudinally in the home setting.

There are 159 million Americans drinking tea daily. However, despite this booming demand, people are unable to get a good cup of tea in a short period of time due to face-paced work and lifestyle. We believe today’s tea experience isn’t keeping up with modern lifestyles and there is a clear gap in the market for a faster, smarter way to enjoy premium lea. So we want to launch our Tea Expresso Machine, which is inspired by coffee machines.

Our TeaEspresso Machine learns customer’s preferences and daily needs by AI-Powered personalization. This machine syncs with a mobile app and voice assistants for seamless control with a premium aesthetics appearance. Users can start brewing with a tap on their phone or a simple voice command. TeaEspresso is built with sustainability as a core. We use fully compostable tea pods and a closed-loop recycling program to ensure minimal waste.

Prematurity is a serious risk factor for hypoglycemia (low blood glucose concentration), one of the most common and critical metabolic disturbances in neonates. Hypoglycemia incidence ranges from 20-73% in preterm infants, and if left untreated can result in seizures, coma, cognitive impairment, and death. The American Academy of Pediatricians (AAP) establishes blood glucose monitoring as a necessary component of the intensive care workflow for at-risk infants. Current point-of-care glucose monitoring (i.e., the heel-stick method) is the most frequent noxious procedure performed in the NICU. AAP guidelines are shifting away from conducting painful procedures in the NICU due to links to infection, pain, and breastfeeding interruption. Interruptions that occur during these critical developmental stages are associated with long-lasting neurodevelopmental deficits and hyperalgesia. Thus, a method to continuously monitor blood glucose concentrations in preterm neonates in the NICU is required to diminish adverse neurodevelopment from hypoglycemia and noxious medical procedures.

PbS colloidal quantum dots (PbS CQDs) are a promising material for next-generation solar cells and thus are a focus of research for renewable energy. The tunability of PbS CQD sizes allows for precise control of bandgap energy in the visible and near-infrared region, particularly useful for creating multi-junction solar cells. Current commercial solar cells use bulk material in a single-junction architecture, meaning only a certain range of wavelengths of light from the sun is absorbed.

Multi-junction solar cell architectures utilize multiple layers with different properties that absorb across a wider sunlight bandwidth, allowing for power conversion efficiencies that surpass the limits of a single-junction cell. With the goal of building a multi-junction architecture, we aim to optimize the synthesis of CQDs with bandgap energies of 1 eV and 1.6 eV. We also present a novel synthesis method for a single-population of ultrasmall PbS CQDs with an exciton range of 600-800 nm, useful for triple junction solar cells.