Medical Devices and Healthcare IT

Watch: Flexible fiber optic sensors provide tactile sensation

29 November 2020

A flexible fiber optic sensor developed at Cornell University detects pressure, strain and other deformations as a stretchable skin with diverse applications from soft robots to healthcare. By providing a sense of touch, the sensors could provide additional functionality for medical soft robots or prostheses and also be useful in measuring forces in physical therapy and sports medicine.

The researchers started with silica-based distributed fiber-optic sensors that detect minor wavelength shifts to gauge changes in humidity, temperature and other parameters. To render these devices compatible with soft A 3D-printed glove is lined with stretchable fiber-optic sensors that use light to detect a range of deformations in real time. Source: Cornell UniversityA 3D-printed glove is lined with stretchable fiber-optic sensors that use light to detect a range of deformations in real time. Source: Cornell Universityand stretchable electronics, a stretchable lightguide for multimodal sensing was formed as a long tube with two polyurethane elastomeric cores. One core is transparent and the other encases absorbing dyes at multiple locations and connects to an LED, and each core is coupled with a red-green-blue sensor chip to register geometric changes in the optical path of light. The design increases the number of outputs by which the sensor can detect different deformations by lighting up the dyes, which act as spatial encoders.

Changes in optical paths in the two cores detect deformation and map it onto a color space. By monitoring changes in the color and intensity in both elastomer-based fibers, the researchers could distinguish bending, stretching and localized pressing with a spatial resolution down to about 1 cm.

The utility of the low-cost, wearable distributed fiber-optic sensor was demonstrated by incorporating the devices into each finger of a 3D-printed glove. The battery-powered, Bluetooth-equipped glove transmits data about finger movements and the forces acting on the sensors in real time.

To contact the author of this article, email shimmelstein@globalspec.com


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