Wearable sensing technologies have been developed rapidly in the last decades for physiological and biomechanical signal monitoring. Much attention has been paid to functions of wearable applications, but comfort parameters have been overlooked. This research presents a developed fabric temperature sensor by adopting fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensors and processing via a textile platform. This FBG-based quasi-distributed sensing system demonstrated a sensitivity of 10.61 ± 0.08 pm/°C with high stability in various temperature environments. No obvious wavelength shift occurred under the curvatures varying from 0 to 50.48 m−1 and in different integration methods with textiles. The temperature distribution monitored by the developed textile sensor in a complex environment with multiple heat sources was deduced using MATLAB to present a real-time dynamic temperature distribution in the wearing environment. This novel fabric temperature sensor shows high sensitivity, stability, and usability with comfort textile properties that are of great potential in wearable applications.

An opto-microfluidic static pressure sensor based on a fiber Fabry-Perot Interferometer (FPI) with extended air cavity for enhancing the measuring sensitivity is proposed. The FPI is constructed in a microfluidic channel by the combination of the fixed fiber-end reflection and floating liquid surface reflection faces. A change of the aquatic pressure will cause a drift of the liquid surface and the pressure can be measured by detecting the shift of the FPI spectrum. Sensitivity of the sensor structure can be enhanced significantly by extending the air region of the FPI. The structure is manufactured by using a common single-mode optical fiber, and a silica capillary with the inner wall coated with a hydrophobic film. A sample with 3500 μm air cavity length has demonstrated the pressure sensitivity of about 32.4 μm/kPa, and the temperature cross-sensitivity of about 0.33 kPa/K.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract