Pathogens and adulterants in human feeding consumables can be readily identified according to their electrical properties. Electrical bioimpedance analysis (BIA) has been widely used for body contents characterization, such as blood, urine, lactate, and sweat. If the concentration of glucose in blood alters the electrical properties of the blood medium, then the impedance spectrum obtained by BIA can be used to measure glycemia. For some applications, artificial neural networks allow the correlation of these parameters both impedance and concentration of glucose by means of symbolic and statistical rules. According to our literature review, there is not any physical model that allows the interpretation of the relationship between blood’s electrical properties from impedance spectra and the concentration of glucose in blood plasma. This article proposes a simplified physical model for blood electrical conductivity as a function of concentration of glucose, based on Bruggeman’s effective medium theory. The equations of this model were obtained considering an insulating phase distribution diffused in a conductive matrix, in which red blood cells are represented by macroscopic insulating nuclei and glucose molecules by microscopic insulating particles. The impedance spectrum for different glucose concentrations (4.0 to 6.8 mmol/L) in a blood sample, published by Kamat Bagul (2014), were compared to the proposed model. The results showed a significant correlation with the experimental data, showing a maximum error of 5.2%. The proposed model might be useful in the design of noninvasive blood glucose monitoring systems.

In this work we carry out extensive numerical study of a Watt-centrifugal-governor system model, and we also implement an electronic circuit by analog computation to experimentally solve the model. Our numerical results show the existence of self-organized stable periodic structures (SPSs) on parameter-space of the largest Lyapunov exponent and isospikes of time series of the Watt governor system model. A peculiar hierarchical organization and period-adding bifurcation cascade of the SPSs are observed, and this self-organized cascade accumulates on a periodic boundary. It is also shown that the periods of these structures organize themselves obeying the solutions of Diophantine equations. In addition, an experimental setup is implemented by a circuitry analogy of mechanical systems using analog computing technique to characterize the robustness of our numerical results. After applying an active control of chaos in the experiment, the effect of intrinsic experimental noise was minimized such that, the experimental results are in astonishing well agreement with our numerical findings. We can also mention as another remarkable result, the application of analog computing technique to perform an experimental circuitry analysis in real mechanical problems.

In this work we carry out experimental studies of the paradigmatic Chua's circuit using an approach of the analog computation instead of performing experiments in the canonical circuit. This means that we have built an electronic circuit that integrates (analog computation), in continuous time, the equations of motion of the canonical Chua's circuit. The equations of motion of the analogical circuit are equivalent to the canonical circuit, so that the dynamical behaviour is the same. With this approach, we successfully obtain an experimental parameter plane using the largest Lyapunov exponent (here named Lyapunov diagram), directly calculated from the experimental time series, with a good precision, so that different types of dynamical behaviours were characterized in this diagram. Results are in very good agreement with numerical simulation with an additional Gaussian noise. The approach by analog computation used here can be extended to a wide range of dynamical systems, once that the analog circuit simulates, by circuitry implementation, the dynamics of these systems from an experimental point of view.

Pathogens and adulterants in human feeding consumables can be readily identified according to their electrical properties. Electrical bioimpedance analysis (BIA) has been widely used for body contents characterization, such as blood, urine, lactate and sweat. If the blood glucose concentration alters the electrical properties of the blood medium, then the impedance spectrum obtained by BIA can be used to measure glycemia. In some applications, artificial neural networks allows the correlation of these parameters (impedance and glucose concentration) by means of symbolic and statistical rules. According to our literature review, there is any physical model that allows the interpretation of the relationship between blood’s electrical properties, obtained by BIA, and the concentration of glucose in the blood plasma. This article proposes a simplified physical model for blood electrical conductivity as a function of glucose concentration, based on Bruggeman’s effective medium theory. The equations of this model were obtained considering an insulating phase distribution diffused in a conductive matrix, in which red blood cells are represented by macroscopic insulating nuclei and glucose molecules by microscopic insulating particles. The impedance spectrum for different glucose concentrations (4.0 to 6.8 mmol/L) in a blood sample, published by Kamat Bagul (2014), were compared with the proposed model. The results showed a significant correlation with the experimental data, showing a maximum error of 5.2%. The proposed model might be useful in the design of noninvasive blood glucose monitoring systems.

Current sources play an essential role in tissue excitation used in bioelectrical impedance spectroscopy. Most investigations use Howland current sources that, despite their practicality and simplified implementation, have operating frequency limitations and dependence on the load impedance due to their narrow output impedance, especially at higher frequencies. The objective of this work is to propose a model for a robust current-controlled sinusoidal oscillator. The oscillator is based on fully analog electronics, which enables controlling the oscillation phase and amplitude by using a voltage reference. The mathematical model is based on Pyragas control application to the classical harmonic oscillator. From the modeling process, an oscillator topology was built based on second-generation current carriers and on transconductance amplifiers. A sinusoidal voltage source having a frequency of 1 MHz and an amplitude of 1Vpp was used as a reference signal to drive the oscillator. The oscillator output current synchronized the oscillations’ phase and amplitude using the reference, regardless of their magnitude before the control signal acted in the circuit at t≈13.5μs. SPICE simulations using ideal components have confirmed the successful operation of the proposed oscillator. This type of oscillator can be implemented in SOIC, then allowing oscillation control interface with logic circuits.