In recent years, unrestrained monitoring human posture and action is a field of increasing interest in the welfare of the elderly and the sport-biomechanics. The scope is this study is that we develop a wearable sensing clothes, which can detect entire body posture and motion using a hetero-core optic fiber sensor. This newly developed sensor can offers several advantages such as the simplicity of structure and fabrication, the stable single mode based operation, the temperature independent property, and the precise loss controllability on given macro bending. These properties are suitable for implementing unrestrained wearable clothes. In this paper, for monitoring flexion of joint without the disturbance of the rucks in the clothes, we proposed and fabricated the improved module structured in the joint ranging 0-90 degree. Additionally, in order to reduce the number of transmission line to be added due to monitoring the whole body posture and motion, we tested that two hetero-core sensors which are tandem placed in a single transmission line have been discriminated by the temporal differential of the optical loss. As a result, we have successfully demonstrated that the wearable sensing clothes could monitor arm motion and human walking without restraint to human daily behavior.

Date Published: 10 April 2007
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 6529, Sensors and Smart Structures Technologies for Civil, Mechanical, and Aerospace Systems 2007, 65291Y (10 April 2007);

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6529:
Sensors and Smart Structures Technologies for Civil, Mechanical, and Aerospace Systems 2007
Masayoshi Tomizuka; Chung-Bang Yun; Victor Giurgiutiu, Editor(s)