Plastic Optical Fiber Sensor for Noninvasive Arterial Pulse Waveform Monitoring

Central arterial pulse pressure monitoring has been considered a key factor in hypertension assessment and cardiovascular prevention. In this paper, it is presented an intensity-based plastic optical fiber sensor for noninvasive monitoring of the carotid pulse waveform. The advantages of this sensing method are the low implementation cost, high robustness, and the signal processing simplicity. The sensor showed a suitable sensitivity to movements up to 370 μm, with a displacement resolution of 0.1 μm. As preliminary proof of concept, the sensor was used to detect the arterial pulse waveform in some human subjects, allowing the assessment of key indexes for heart and arterial stiffness evaluation, such as augmentation index, subendocardial viability ratio, and ejection duration.