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Epilepsy is one of the most common neurological diseases globally (around 50M people globally). Fortunately, up to 70% of people with epilepsy could live seizure-free if properly diagnosed and treated, and a reliable technique to monitor the onset of seizures could improve the quality of life of patients who are constantly facing the fear of random seizure attacks. The current gold standard, video-EEG (v-EEG), involves attaching over 20 electrodes to the scalp, is costly, requires hospitalization, trained professionals, and is uncomfortable for patients. To address this gap, we developedEarSD, a lightweight and unobtrusive ear-worn system to detect seizure onsets by measuring physiological signals behind the ears. This system can be integrated into earphones, headphones, or hearing aids, providing a convenient solution for continuous monitoring.EarSDis an integrated custom-builtsensing-computing-communicationear-worn platform to capture seizure signals, remove the noises caused by motion artifacts and environmental impacts, and stream the collected data wirelessly to the computer/mobile phone nearby.EarSD’s ML algorithm, running on a server, identifies seizure-associated signatures and detects onset events. We evaluated the proposed system in both in-lab and in-hospital experiments at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center with epileptic seizure patients, confirming its usability and practicality. 

China has made a concerted effort to successfully improve water quality of rivers, but lake water quality has not improved. Lakes require controls on both catchment external nutrient loads and in-lake internal loads, where nature-based solutions are coupled with engineered systems to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). 

In inorganic materials, an alloy is a mixture of two or more substances that generally exhibits electronic and/or physical properties that differ from those of its constituents. In organic systems, the formation of a “molecular alloy” comprising mixtures of molecular organic materials has also been proposed. We test the validity of this concept via the study of the optoelectronic properties of a ternary system that has previously been identified to form a molecular acceptor alloy, namely a blend of a poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT) donor, with two acceptors indene-C 60 bisadduct (ICBA) and phenyl-C 61 -butyric acid methyl ester (PC 61 BM) [R. A. Street, et al. , J. Am. Chem. Soc. , 2013, 135 , 986–989]. Using photoelectron spectroscopy, we find that the ICBA:PC 61 BM blend shows the same highest occupied molecular orbital and exciton energies as that of ICBA, indicating the absence of a new exciton state in the blend. Furthermore, charge transfer state spectra of ternary blends are found to comprise a simple linear superposition of the corresponding binaries. From these results, no evidence of new, emergent electronic states is found to support the existence of a molecular alloy in this system. To our knowledge there is as yet no clear evidence of the existence of an alloy in any organic semiconductor system. We discuss the criteria that should be met by a molecular organic alloy and procedures needed for their unambiguous identification.