Development of wearable sensitive glove embedded with hetero-hore fiber-optic nerves for monitoring finger joints

The development of a new sensitive glove is described using hetero-core fiber-optic nerve sensors, in which the glove not only works as a motion capture tool but also as a tactile sensing device. The purpose of this study is to add tactile sensing function like human skin to the conventional glove sensor. A hetero-core fiber-optic sensor is suited to the wearable sensitive glove because of its advantages for an optical fiber such as flexibility, light weight, and thin size structure. In addition, the hetero-core fiber has been known to have highly sensitive and re-producible performance by a bending action of simple structure. A prototype of sensitive glove is fabricated by latex using a real human hand mold to capture finger motions, and to sense tactile feeling. Imperceptible pressure change due to pulsation signal is successfully detected through the sensitive function of a hetero-core optic nerve tactile sensor structure. The experimental results have been presented in terms of the real-time response and the optical loss change for periodic motion of the finger flexion together with the details structure of proposed glove.