Plastic optical fibre sensor for spine bending monitoring

peer-reviewedThis paper presents a study on the application of plastic optical fibre for spine bending monitoring based on an intensity modulation. The bending angle is measured as the angle between the emitting and receiving fibres is changed. The measured light attenuation is compared with a theoretical evaluation and the differences between these values are discussed. It was found that the light attenuation for the light intensity agreed well (margin of error < 15%) with the theoretical value for the range between 180o (representing no bend) and 200o and it was significantly increased for the bending angle beyond that value due to the effect of fibre gap increment which resulted in a less reliable experimental estimation.PUBLISHEDpeer-reviewe

Recent Results From the EU POF-PLUS Project: Multi-Gigabit Transmission Over 1 mm Core Diameter Plastic Optical Fibers

Recent activity to achieve multi-gigabit transmission over 1 mm core diameter graded-index and step-index plastic optical fibers for distances up to 50 meters is reported in this paper. By employing a simple intensity-modulated direct-detection system with pulse amplitude or digital multi-tone modulation techniques, low-cost transceivers and easy to install large-core POFs, it is demonstrated that multi-gigabit transmission up to 10 Gbit/s over 1-mm core diameter POF infrastructure is feasible. The results presented in this paper were obtained in the EU FP7 POF-PLUS project, which focused on applications in different scenarios, such as in next-generation in-building residential networks and in datacom applications

Structural and Electronic Properties of Small Neutral (MgO)n Clusters

Ab initio Perturbed Ion (PI) calculations are reported for neutral stoichiometric (MgO)n clusters (n<14). An extensive number of isomer structures was identified and studied. For the isomers of (MgO)n (n<8) clusters, a full geometrical relaxation was considered. Correlation corrections were included for all cluster sizes using the Coulomb-Hartree-Fock (CHF) model proposed by Clementi. The results obtained compare favorably to the experimental data and other previous theoretical studies. Inclusion of correlaiotn is crucial in order to achieve a good description of these systems. We find an important number of new isomers which allows us to interpret the experimental magic numbers without the assumption of structures based on (MgO)3 subunits. Finally, as an electronic property, the variations in the cluster ionization potential with the cluster size were studied and related to the structural isomer properties.Comment: 24 pages, LaTeX, 7 figures in GIF format. Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

Plastic Optical Fiber Technology for Reliable Home Networking: Overview and Results of the EU Project POF-ALL

The rising performance of broadband connections for residential users, particularly in conjunction with fiber to the home, will present a new challenge for telecom operators in the short and medium terms: how to deliver the high bit rate digital signals with high quality-of-service to all consumer devices scattered inside the building of final users? Among the many different solutions for the home network, we review in this article the use of polymer optical fibers for short-reach and high-capacity optical communications for residential customer premises. POF is an easy-to-install, low-cost, and eye-safe solution for these networks, with the potential of being future-proof. In this article the state of the art in POF technology is presented by summarizing significant results achieved in the European project POF-ALL. Data transmission rates of more than 1 Gb/s over 50+ m and 100 Mb/s over 200+ m of standard step-index POF have been show

Success Factors of European Syndromic Surveillance Systems: A Worked Example of Applying Qualitative Comparative Analysis

Introduction: Syndromic surveillance aims at augmenting traditional public health surveillance with timely information. To gain a head start, it mainly analyses existing data such as from web searches or patient records. Despite the setup of many syndromic surveillance systems, there is still much doubt about the benefit of the approach. There are diverse interactions between performance indicators such as timeliness and various system characteristics. This makes the performance assessment of syndromic surveillance systems a complex endeavour. We assessed if the comparison of several syndromic surveillance systems through Qualitative Comparative Analysis helps to evaluate performance and identify key success factors. Materials and Methods: We compiled case-based, mixed data on performance and characteristics of 19 syndromic surveillance systems in Europe from scientific and grey literature and from site visits. We identified success factors by applying crisp-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis. We focused on two main areas of syndromic surveillance application: seasonal influenza surveillance and situational awareness during different types of potentially health threatening events. Results: We found that syndromic surveillance systems might detect the onset or peak of seasonal influenza earlier if they analyse non-clinical data sources. Timely situational awareness during different types of events is supported by an automated syndromic surveillance system capable of analysing multiple syndromes. To our surprise, the analysis of multiple data sources was no key success factor for situational awareness. Conclusions: We suggest to consider these key success factors when designing or further developing syndromic surveillance systems. Qualitative Comparative Analysis helped interpreting complex, mixed data on small-N cases and resulted in concrete and practically relevant findings

Results of the EUROTeV Post Collision Line Design (PCDL) Task

This paper is the deliverable of the EUROTeV Post Collision Line Design (PCDL) task and gives an overview of the published results

Effect of stimulus orientation and intensity on short-interval intracortical inhibition (SICI) and facilitation (SICF) : A multi-channel transcranial magnetic stimulation study

Publisher Copyright: © 2021 Tugin et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.Besides stimulus intensities and interstimulus intervals (ISI), the electric field (E-field) orientation is known to affect both short-interval intracortical inhibition (SICI) and facilitation (SICF) in paired-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). However, it has yet to be established how distinct orientations of the conditioning (CS) and test stimuli (TS) affect the SICI and SICF generation. With the use of a multi-channel TMS transducer that provides electronic control of the stimulus orientation and intensity, we aimed to investigate how changes in the CS and TS orientation affect the strength of SICI and SICF. We hypothesized that the CS orientation would play a major role for SICF than for SICI, whereas the CS intensity would be more critical for SICI than for SICF. In eight healthy subjects, we tested two ISIs (1.5 and 2.7 ms), two CS and TS orientations (anteromedial (AM) and posteromedial (PM)), and four CS intensities (50, 70, 90, and 110% of the resting motor threshold (RMT)). The TS intensity was fixed at 110% RMT. The intensities were adjusted to the corresponding RMT in the AM and PM orientations. SICI and SICF were observed in all tested CS and TS orientations. SICI depended on the CS intensity in a U-shaped manner in any combination of the CS and TS orientations. With 70% and 90% RMT CS intensities, stronger PM-oriented CS induced stronger inhibition than weaker AM-oriented CS. Similar SICF was observed for any CS orientation. Neither SICI nor SICF depended on the TS orientation. We demonstrated that SICI and SICF could be elicited by the CS perpendicular to the TS, which indicates that these stimuli affected either overlapping or strongly connected neuronal populations. We concluded that SICI is primarily sensitive to the CS intensity and that CS intensity adjustment resulted in similar SICF for different CS orientations.Peer reviewe

Low-Cost and Robust 1-Gbit/s Plastic Optical Fiber Link Based on Light-Emitting Diode Technology

1-Gbit/s transmission is demonstrated over 50 m of step-index PMMA plastic optical fiber (1-mm core-diameter) using a commercial light-emitting diode. This is enabled by use of discrete multitone modulation with up to 64-QAM constellation mapping