Recent Development in the Fabrication of Collagen Scaffolds for Tissue Engineering Applications: A Review

Tissue engineering focuses on developing biological substitutes to restore, maintain or improve tissue functions. The three main components of its application are scaffold, cell and growthstimulating signals. Scaffolds composed of biomaterials mainly function as the structural support for ex vivo cells to attach and proliferate. They also provide physical, mechanical and biochemical cues for the differentiation of cells before transferring to the in vivo site. Collagen has been long used in various clinical applications, including drug delivery. The wide usage of collagen in the clinical field can be attributed to its abundance in nature, biocompatibility, low antigenicity and biodegradability. In addition, the high tensile strength and fibril-forming ability of collagen enable its fabrication into various forms, such as sheet/membrane, sponge, hydrogel, beads, nanofibre and nanoparticle, and as a coating material. The wide option of fabrication technology together with the excellent biological and physicochemical characteristics of collagen has stimulated the use of collagen scaffolds in various tissue engineering applications. This review describes the fabrication methods used to produce various forms of scaffolds used in tissue engineering applications.

Uranus: a middleware architecture for dependable AAL and vital signs monitoring applications

The design and realization of health monitoring applications has attracted the interest of large communities both from industry and academia. Several research challenges have been faced and issues tackled in order to realize effective applications for the management and monitoring of people with chronic diseases, people with disabilities, elderly people. However, there is a lack of efficient tools that enable rapid and possibly cheap realization of reliable health monitoring applications. The paper presents Uranus, a service oriented middleware architecture, which provides basic functions for the integration of different kinds of biomedical sensors. Uranus has also distinguishing characteristics like services for the run-time verification of the correctness of running applications and mechanisms for the recovery from failures. The paper concludes with two case studies as proof of concept.