Henrie van den Boom

Henrie van den Boom is an Assistant Professor in Electro-Optical Communication Systems at Eindhoven University of Technology. His areas of expertise include Electrical Engineering, Communication Engineering and Electronic Engineering. Currently, his research is focused on radio over fiber and novel optical sensor systems and applications, using Plastic Optical Fibres. Plastic optical fibre (POF), also referred to as Polymer optical fibre, offers several practical benefits. It is highly resistant to bending and stretching and maintains a high refractive index difference between the cable core and cladding. What’s more, the fibre cables, optical links, connectors, and installation are all relatively inexpensive. A new IEEE Ethernet specification is providing a pathway toward support for gigabit transmission rates over this fiber type.

Its properties also make POF suitable for robust and low-cost sensor applications. A possible new application is position detection for monitoring patients with sleep-related movement disorders. Tools are urgently needed to obtain a detailed patient-friendly long-term assessment of sleep-related movements in the home situation. In collaboration with a sleep medicine center, an optical two-dimensional pressure sensing system for real-time patient monitoring, based on a novel and patented principle, which can easily be placed under a mattress in a home environment is being investigated.

Optical communication enables to connect users, homes, cities, countries and continents to form the physical layer for the Internet and is the underlying technology behind the explosion of bandwidth and bandwidth-related services we now all take for granted.