"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."

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.

Henrie van den Boom received his MSc in Electrical Engineering from TU/e in 1984. Since then, he has been an Assistant Professor at the Electro-Optical Communication Systems group of the Institute for Photonic Integration (IPI) at TU/e. Henrie has been giving lectures in the field of optical fiber communications and basic telecommunications for many years. He has been involved in national and international re­search projects on coherent optical communicati­on sys­tems, optical cross-connected networks, broad­band communications in Hybrid Fiber Coax networks, mode division multiplexing systems and Polymer Optical Fiber systems and networks.

Henrie has (co-)authored over 200 journal and conference papers and  is the treasurer of the IEEE Photonics group, Benelux Chapter.

Institute for Photonic Integration (IPI)