The proper measurement of plantar pressure during gait is critical for the clinical diagnosis of foot problems. Force platforms and wearable devices have been developed to study gait patterns during walking or running. However, these devices are often expensive, cumbersome, or have boundary constraints that limit the participant’s motions. Recent advancements in the quality of plastic optical fiber (POF) have made it possible to manufacture a low-cost bend sensor with a novel design for use in plantar pressure monitoring. An intensity-based POF bend sensor is not only lightweight, non-invasive, and easy to construct, but it also produces a signal that requires almost no processing. In this work, we have designed, fabricated, and characterized a novel intensity POF sensor to detect the force applied by the human foot and measure the gait pattern. The sensors were put through a series of dynamic and static tests to determine their measurement range, sensitivity, and linearity, and their response was compared to that of two different commercial force sensors, including piezo resistive sensors and a clinical force platform. The results suggest that this novel POF bend sensor can be used in a wide range of applications, given its low cost and non-invasive nature. Feedback walking monitoring for ulcer prevention or sports performance could be just one of those applications.

Taking non-contact temperature measurements in narrow areas or confined spaces of non-uniform surfaces requires high spatial resolution and independence of emissivity uncertainties that conventional cameras can hardly provide. Two-color optical fiber (OF) pyrometers based on standard single-mode (SMF) and multi-mode optical fibers (MMF) with a small core diameter and low numerical aperture in combination with associated commercially available components can provide a spatial resolution in the micrometer range, independent of the material’s emissivity. Our experiment involved using a patterned microheater to generate temperatures of approximately 340 °C on objects with a diameter of 0.25 mm. We measured these temperatures using two-color optical fiber pyrometers at a 1 kHz sampling rate, which were linearized in the range of 250 to 500 °C. We compared the results with those obtained using an industrial infrared camera. The tests show the potential of our technique for quickly measuring temperature gradients in small areas, independent of emissivity, such as in microthermography. We also report simulations and experiments, showing that the optical power gathered via each channel of the SMF and MMF pyrometers from hot objects of 250 µm is independent of distance until the OF light spot becomes larger than the diameter of the object at 0.9 mm and 0.4 mm, respectively.