Rising pollution worldwide is a major reason for increasing number of patients of chronic respiratory diseases (CRD) like Asthma. CRD are irreversible, can only be managed through proper care and medication. Spirometry is the only known test for finding the functional health of lungs but 90% of CRD patients fail to perform the test. Moreover, Spirometry is non reproducible and difference of about 20% were reported over two tests in reasonably close time instance. This is a painful test as a patient has to make full capacity forced exhalation without coughing, a rare possibility with CRD patients. Device prototype tested here is S-MASK, envisioned to assess the level of breathing discomfort experienced by a CRD patient. S-MASK is a compact and sensitive device that can capture the normal or quiet breath. Design objective of S-MASK is to develop a device that can be used on regular basis to assess the wellness and relative/absolute relief from CRD symptoms.The design of S-MASK and its validation is presented in this paper. Breath rate computed from the device has R-squared = 0.9 and p-Value-4with respect to manually observed values. Breath samples collected using S-MASK found to have μ = 0.308 Hz and σ = 0.073 Hz which corresponds to μ = 18.66 bpm (breath per minute) and σ = 4.38 bpm. These values are significantly close to manually observed breath rate i.e. μ = 17.8 bpm and σ = 4.22 bpm.These results are statistically significant to validate the capabilities of S-MASK to capture the quite breath and identify the rate. S-MASK is device of its kind that computes the breath rate using frequency spectrum.

Motivation: Microsatellites or Simple Sequence Repeats (SSRs) are short tandem repeats of DNA motifs present in all genomes. They have long been used for a variety of purposes in the areas of population genetics, genotyping, marker-assisted selection and forensics. Numerous studies have highlighted their functional roles in genome organization and gene regulation. Though several tools are currently available to identify SSRs from genomic sequences, they have significant limitations. Results: We present a novel algorithm called PERF for extremely fast and comprehensive identification of microsatellites from DNA sequences of any size. PERF is several fold faster than existing algorithms and uses up to 5-fold lesser memory. It provides a clean and flexible command-line interface to change the default settings, and produces output in an easily-parseable tab-separated format. In addition, PERF generates an interactive and stand-alone HTML report with charts and tables for easy downstream analysis. Availability and implementation: PERF is implemented in the Python programming language. It is freely available on PyPI under the package name perf_ssr, and can be installed directly using pip or easy_install. The documentation of PERF is available at https://github.com/rkmlab/perf. The source code of PERF is deposited in GitHub at https://github.com/rkmlab/perf under an MIT license. Contact: [email protected]. Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.