Wearable Optical Fiber Sensor Based on a Bend Singlemode-Multimode-Singlemode Fiber Structure for Respiration Monitoring

Respiration rate (RR) is an important information related to human physiological health. A wearable optical fiber sensor for respiration monitoring based on a bend singlemode-multimode-singlemode (SMS) fiber structure, which is highly sensitive to bend, is firstly proposed and experimentally demonstrated. The sensor fastened by an elastic belt on the abdomen of a person will acquire the respiration signal when the person breaths, which will introduce front and back movement of the abdomen, and thus bend of SMS fiber structure. Short-time Fourier transform (STFT) method is employed for signal processing to extract characteristic information of both the time and frequency domain of the measured waveform, which provides accurate RR measurement. Six different SMS fiber sensors have been tested by six individuals and the experimental results demonstrated that the RR signals can be effectively monitored among different individuals, where an average Pearson Correlation Coefficient of 0.88 of the respiration signal has been achieved, which agrees very well with that of commercial belt respiration sensor. The proposed technique can provide a new wearable and portable solution for monitoring of respiratory with advantage of easy fabrication and robust to environment.