Intelligent Wearable Photonic Sensing System for Remote Healthcare Monitoring Using Stretchable Elastomer Optical Fiber

Medical Internet of Things technology can effectively enable remote physiological data collection, monitoring, and transmission by integrating flexible sensors, wireless communication, and the human body in a wearable and embedded manner. Herein, a stretchable elastomer optical fiber has been developed and sandwiched with two PMMA optical fibers to form a fully flexible polymer optical fiber sensor. The optical fiber integrated with the system mainly consists of a microcomputer, a light-emitting diode driver, a light-emitting diode light source, a photodiode, and a Bluetooth module. One intelligent wearable photonic sensing system has been developed based on the Beer-Lambert law of the stretchable elastomer optical fiber for remote healthcare monitoring. Benefiting from the use of elastomer polymer materials, the sensing system features a maximum strain of more than 250%, a high tensile strain of up to 100%, and a durability of >500 tests. Also, based on the advantage of elastomer optical fiber, the sensing part can be flexibly pasted on the skin surface as a wearable device for real-time monitoring of multiple physiological parameters. In this study, we successfully realized the monitoring of breathing pattern, heart rate, pulse, facial micro-activity, and joint activity, and the recognition of articulatory activity and knee joint activity using a one-dimensional convolutional neural network, with an accuracy of more than 90% for each activity recognition. Such merits demonstrate its potential as a medical toolkit and indicate promise for remote healthcare monitoring.