The development of stimuli‐responsive drug delivery systems offers significant opportunities for innovations in industry. It is possible to produce polymer‐based drug delivery devices enabling spatiotemporal control of the release of the drug triggered by an electrical stimulus. Here we describe the development of a wireless controller for drug delivery from conductive/electroactive polymer‐based biomaterials and demonstrate its function
Smartphone-powered efficient water disinfection at the point of use
Clean water free of bacteria is a precious resource in areas where no centralized water facilities are available. Conventional chlorine disinfection is limited by chemical transportation, storage, and the production of carcinogenic by-products. Here, a smartphone-powered disinfection system is developed for point-of-use (POU) bacterial inactivation. The integrated system uses the smartphone battery as a power source, and a customized on-the-go (OTG) hardware connected to the phone to realize the desired electrical output. Through a downloadable mobile application, the electrical output, either constant current (20–1000 µA) or voltage (0.7–2.1 V), can be configured easily through a user-friendly graphical interface on the screen. The disinfection device, a coaxial-electrode copper ionization cell (CECIC), inactivates bacteria by low levels of electrochemically generated copper with low energy consumption. The strategy of constant current control is applied in this study to solve the problem of uncontrollable copper release by previous constant voltage control. With the current control, a high inactivation efficiency of
- Award ID(s):
- 1845354
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10307624
- Publisher / Repository:
- Nature Publishing Group
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- npj Clean Water
- Volume:
- 3
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2059-7037
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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