Photonic-based systems for breath, blood or tissue analysis opens the way to a wide variety of health care applications. Breath analysis of CO₂ and O₂ can be used to monitor the fitness of patients. General health relevant applications of gas sensing include air pollution sensing, which can cause and aggravate respiratory and cardiovascular diseases.

Using laser-based O₂-sensing in the lungs of prematurely born babies permits to monitor the development of  the lungs non-invasively with high sensitivity.

Blood analyses by semiconductor laser sensing provides new diagnostic access without compromising the well-being of the patients. Using non-invasive laser measurements at specific wavelengths permits e.g. to monitor the blood glucose content, avoiding the need for diabetes patients to take blood one or several times per day.

Laser-based sensing can be used for example to distinguish between healthy tissue and tissue affected by osteoarthritis providing a quantitative indicator for the removal of degraded tissue by minimally invasive surgery.  

Low-power consumption miniaturized laser-based sensor systems may be designed as body implants opening up a wide variety of new applications.

Health applications typically require customer-specific wavelengths as well as tailormade designs of the sensing lasers. PSS employs distributed feedback lasers optimized for gas detection as well as widely tunable lasers suitable for liquid and solid phase applications at virtually any wavelength from the visible to the 10 µm range.

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