An optical fibre-based sensor for respiratory monitoring

In this paper, a textile-based respiratory sensing system is presented. Highly flexible polymeric optical fibres (POFs) that react to applied pressure were integrated into a carrier fabric to form a wearable sensing system. After the evaluation of different optical fibres, different setups were compared. To demonstrate the feasibility of such a wearable sensor, the setup featuring the best performance was placed on the human torso, and thus it was possible to measure the respiratory rate. Furthermore, we show that such a wearable system enables to keep track of the way of breathing (diaphragmatic, upper costal and mixed) when the sensor is placed at different positions of the torso. A comparison of the results with the output of some commercial respiratory measurements devices confirmed the utility of such a monitoring device.