Increased Risk of Falling in Older Adults When Coordinating Obstacle Avoidance and Grasping.

This study aimed to investigate the kinematic changes in obstacle avoidance and prehension tasks performed simultaneously by older adults with a history of falls at different levels of task difficulty. Twenty-six older adults were divided into faller and nonfaller groups. The experimental protocol was divided into two different tasks: walking with obstacle avoidance and walking with obstacle avoidance combined with a reach-to-grasp task.

POF Smart Carpet: A Multiplexed Polymer Optical Fiber-Embedded Smart Carpet for Gait Analysis.

This paper presents the development of a smart carpet based on polymer optical fiber (POF) for ground reaction force (GRF) and spatio-temporal gait parameter assessment. The proposed carpet has 20 intensity variation-based sensors on one fiber with two photodetectors for acquisition, each one for the response of 10 closer sensors. The used multiplexing technique is based on side-coupling between the light sources and POF lateral sections in which one light-emitting diode (LED) is activated at a time, sequentially.

Polymer Optical Fiber Sensors in Healthcare Applications: A Comprehensive Review.

Advances in medicine and improvements in life quality has led to an increase in the life expectancy of the general population. An ageing world population have placed demands on the use of assistive technology and, in particular, towards novel healthcare devices and sensors. Besides the electromagnetic field immunity, polymer optical fiber (POF) sensors have additional advantages due to their material features such as high flexibility, lower Young's modulus (enabling high sensitivity for mechanical parameters), higher elastic limits, and impact resistance.

Perrogator: A Portable Energy-Efficient Interrogator for Dynamic Monitoring of Wavelength-Based Sensors in Wearable Applications.

In this paper, we report the development of a portable energy-efficient interrogator (Perrogator) for wavelength-based optical sensors. The interrogator is based on a compact solution encompassing a white light source and the spectral convolution between the sensor and a tunable filter, which is acquired by a photodetector, where a microcontroller has two functions: (i) To control the filter tuning and to (ii) acquire the photodetector signal. Then, the data is sent to a single-board computer for further signal processing.

Design considerations, analysis, and application of a low-cost, fully portable, wearable polymer optical fiber curvature sensor.

This paper presents the development of a low-cost, fully portable, wearable sensor for joint angle assessment based on a polymer optical fiber (POF) curvature sensor. The mechanical support configurations as well as the fiber length are analyzed to obtain a sensor with lower hysteresis and higher sensitivity and linearity. In addition, the annealing is made in the fiber to further reduce the sensor errors, and an analysis to obtain the sensor cross-sensitivity with respect to temperature and relative humidity is performed.