Recent development of respiratory rate measurement technologies

Respiratory rate (RR) is an important physiological parameter whose abnormity has been regarded as an important indicator of serious illness. In order to make RR monitoring simple to do, reliable and accurate, many different methods have been proposed for such automatic monitoring. According to the theory of respiratory rate extraction, methods are categorized into three modalities: extracting RR from other physiological signals, RR measurement based on respiratory movements, and RR measurement based on airflow. The merits and limitations of each method are highlighted and discussed. In addition, current works are summarized to suggest key directions for the development of future RR monitoring methodologies

Design of a four-branch optical power splitter based on gallium-nitride using rectangular waveguide coupling for telecommunication links

International audienceThis paper reports design of a simple four-branch optical power splitter using five parallel rectangular waveguides coupling in a gallium-nitride (GaN) semiconductor/sapphire for telecommunication links. The optimisation was conducted using the 3D FD-BPM method for long wavelength optical communication. The result shows that, at propagation length of 925 μ m, the optical power input was successfully split into four uniform output beams, each with 24% of total input power. It is also shown that the relative output power distribution is almost stable through the C-band range. At the operating wavelength of 1.55 μ m, the proposed power splitter has an excess loss lower than 0.2 dB. This study demonstrates the opportunity to develop optical interconnections from UV-Visible to near IR wavelengths