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This paper presents the development, evaluation, calibration, and field application of a novel, relatively inexpensive, vision-based sensor system employing commercially available off-the-shelf devices, for enabling the autonomous data acquisition of road surface conditions. Detailed evaluations and enhancements of a variety of technical approaches and algorithms for overcoming vision-based measurement distortions induced by the motion of the monitoring platform were conducted. It is shown that the proposed multi-sensor system, by capitalizing on powerful data-fusion approaches of the type developed in this paper, can provide a robust cost-effective road surface monitoring system with sufficient accuracy to satisfy typical maintenance needs, in regard to the detection, localization, and quantification of potholes and similar qualitative deterioration features where the measurements are acquired via a vehicle moving at normal speeds on typical city streets. The proposed system is ideal to be used for crowdsourcing where several vehicles would be equipped with this cost-effective system for more frequent data collection of road surfaces. Suggestions for future research needs to enhance the capabilities of the proposed system are included.

As naturally occurring bioactive products, several lines of evidence have shown the potential of polyphenols in the medical intervention of various diseases, including tumors, inflammatory diseases, and cardiovascular diseases. Notably, owing to the particular molecular structure, polyphenols can combine with proteins, metal ions, polymers, and nucleic acids providing better strategies for polyphenol-delivery strategies. This contributes to the inherent advantages of polyphenols as important functional components for other drug delivery strategies, e.g., protecting nanodrugs from oxidation as a protective layer, improving the physicochemical properties of carbohydrate polymer carriers, or being used to synthesize innovative functional delivery vehicles. Polyphenols have emerged as a multifaceted player in novel drug delivery systems, both as therapeutic agents delivered to intervene in disease progression and as essential components of drug carriers. Although an increasing number of studies have focused on polyphenol-based nanodrug delivery including epigallocatechin-3-gallate, curcumin, resveratrol, tannic acid, and polyphenol-related innovative preparations, these molecules are not without inherent shortcomings. The active biochemical characteristics of polyphenols constitute a prerequisite to their high-frequency use in drug delivery systems and likewise to provoke new challenges for the design and development of novel polyphenol drug delivery systems of improved efficacies. In this review, we focus on both the targeted delivery of polyphenols and the application of polyphenols as components of drug delivery carriers, and comprehensively elaborate on the application of polyphenols in new types of drug delivery systems. According to the different roles played by polyphenols in innovative drug delivery strategies, potential limitations and risks are discussed in detail including the influences on the physical and chemical properties of nanodrug delivery systems, and their influence on normal physiological functions inside the organism.