OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to investigate the potential of a newly developed small electrode to accurately record muscle activity during swallowing.
METHODS: This study included 31 healthy participants. The participants underwent swallowing trials with three types of material. The recordings involved the following conditions: 1) swallowing saliva, 2) swallowing 3 mL water, and 3) swallowing 5 mL water. Two types of electrodes, a conventional electrode (CE) and a newly developed small electrode (NE), were symmetrically positioned on the skin over the suprahyoid muscle group, starting from the center. From the surface electromyography data, the swallowing duration (s), peak amplitude, and rising time (duration from swallowing onset to peak amplitude: s) were measured. Additionally, the equivalence of characteristics of the waveform of muscle activities was calculated by using the variance in both the upper and lower confidence limits in duration and rising time.
RESULTS: No significant differences in baseline, swallowing duration or rising time between the CE and NE were observed for any swallowing material. The peak amplitude was significantly higher for the NE than for the CE for all swallowing materials. The CE and NE displayed no significant difference in the equivalence of characteristics of the waveform of muscle activities for any swallowing material.
CONCLUSIONS: The gold-plated small electrodes utilized in this study indicated the ability to record the same characteristics of muscle activity as conventional electrodes. Moreover, it was able to capture the muscle activity of each muscle group with improved sensitivity in a narrow area, such as under the submandibular region, with more precision than that of conventional electrodes.

In this study, the read operation of feedback field-effect transistors (FBFETs) with quasi-nonvolatile memory states was analyzed using a device simulator. For FBFETs, write pulses of 40 ns formed potential barriers in their channels, and charge carriers were accumulated (depleted) in these channels, generating the memory state \"State 1 (State 0)\". Read pulses of 40 ns read these states with a retention time of 3 s, and the potential barrier formation and carrier accumulation were influenced by these read pulses. The potential barriers were analyzed, using junction voltage and current density to explore the memory states. Moreover, FBFETs exhibited nondestructive readout characteristics during the read operation, which depended on the read voltage and pulse width.

In this work, a promising dual-gated thin film transistor (TFT) structure has been proposed and introduced in the shift register (SR)-integrated circuits to reduce the rising time. The threshold voltage can be simultaneously changed by the top gate and the bottom gate in the proposed dual-gated TFTs. When the SR circuits start to export the scan signals in the displays, the driving currents in the SR circuits are increased by switching the working station of driving TFTs from the enhancement characterization to the depletion characterization. Subsequently, the detailed smart spice simulation has been used to study the function of the proposed SR circuits. In the next step, the proposed SR circuits have been fabricated in a G4.5 active-matrix organic light-emitting diode manufacture factory. The simulated and experimental results indicate that the shift register pulses with the full swing amplitude can be obtained in the SR circuits. Moreover, in contrast to the conventional SR circuits employing with the single-gated TFTs, it has been found that the rising time of the output signals can be reduced from 3.75 μs to 1.23 μs in the proposed SR circuits with the dual-gated TFTs, thus exhibiting the significant improvement of the driving force in the proposed SR circuits. Finally, we demonstrated a 31-inch 4K AMOLED display with the proposed SR circuits.

The rising time of a nuclear pulse is slowed before being digitized because of the effect of distributed capacitance and resistance. This results in the waveform distortion of a shaped pulse. In this study, the effect of distributed capacitance and resistance is equivalent to the result of RC network. The mathematical model of the network is established to restore the rising time of the input nuclear pulse. Experimental results show that the leading edge of the nuclear pulse becomes steep after rising time restoration, and the shape of the shaped pulse is also improved. The energy spectrum obtained with rising time restoration is compared with that without rising time restoration. The comparison result indicates that using rising time restoration can extend the measurement range of pulse amplitude without affecting the energy resolution of the system.