In the last decades, fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) have become increasingly attractive to medical applications due to their unique properties such as small size, biocompatibility, immunity to electromagnetic interferences, high sensitivity and multiplexing capability. FBGs have been employed in the development of surgical tools, assistive devices, wearables, and biosensors, showing great potentialities for medical uses. This paper reviews the FBG-based measuring systems, their principle of work, and their applications in medicine and healthcare. Particular attention is given to sensing solutions for biomechanics, minimally invasive surgery, physiological monitoring, and medical biosensing. Strengths, weaknesses, open challenges, and future trends are also discussed to highlight how FBGs can meet the demands of nextgeneration medical devices and healthcare system.

Magnetic field sensing is an important issue for many application areas, such as in the military, industry and navigation. The current sensors used to monitor this parameter can be susceptible to electromagnetic interferences, however due to their advantages over the traditional sensors, the optical fiber devices could be an excellent alternative. Furthermore, magnetic fluid (MF) is a new type of functional material which possesses outstanding properties, including Faraday effect, birefringence, tunable refractive index and field dependent transmission. In this paper, the optical fiber magnetic field sensors using MF as sensing element are reviewed. Due to the extensive literature, only the most used sensing configurations are addressed and discussed, which include optical fiber grating, interferometry, surface plasmon resonance (SPR) and other schemes involving tailored (etched, tapered and U-shaped) fibers.

The integration of fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensors in lithium-ion cells for in-situ and in-operando temperature monitoring is presented herein. The measuring of internal and external temperature variations was performed through four FBG sensors during galvanostatic cycling at C-rates ranging from 1C to 8C. The FBG sensors were placed both outside and inside the cell, located in the center of the electrochemically active area and at the tab-electrode connection. The internal sensors recorded temperature variations of 4.0 ± 0.1 °C at 5C and 4.7 ± 0.1 °C at 8C at the center of the active area, and 3.9 ± 0.1 °C at 5C and 4.0 ± 0.1 °C at 8C at the tab-electrode connection, respectively. This study is intended to contribute to detection of a temperature gradient in real time inside a cell, which can determine possible damage in the battery performance when it operates under normal and abnormal operating conditions, as well as to demonstrate the technical feasibility of the integration of in-operando microsensors inside Li-ion cells.

Nowadays, our society has been experiencing the development of Healthcare 4.0, focusing on digitalization by utilizing cloud/fog computing-based consumer Internet-of-Things (CIoT). Meanwhile, Industry 5.0 has been defined recently, targeting improving the current Industry 4.0. Inspired by Industry 5.0, we are among the first wave of researchers to propose Healthcare 5.0, specifically in the perspective of fog/cloud computing. Concretely, we perform a comprehensive vertical and horizontal summary of Healthcare 1.0 -4.0 and Industry 1.0 -4.0, which enables us to be among the first research efforts to provide a unique prediction of the corresponding upcoming Healthcare 5.0, based on Industry 5.0. In particular, we predict the potential development in Healthcare 5.0, specifically for fog/cloud computing, on top of a comprehensive overview of the role and state-of-the-art development in Healthcare 4.0. We also give our unique insight of the potential technologies of CIoT and fog/cloud computing in Healthcare 5.0, as well as the corresponding opportunities and challenges. Therefore, for the first time, this article provides deep and well-thought insight to open a new era towards the future fog/cloud computing for healthcare system development towards Healthcare 5.0.

The advances and fast spread of mobile devices and technologies, we witness today, have extended its advantages over medical and health practice supported by mobile devices, giving rise to the growing research of Internet of Things (IoT), especially the e-Health field. The features provided by mobile technologies revealed to be of major importance when we consider the continuous aging of population and the consequent increase of its debilities. In addition to the increase of lifetime span of population, also the increase of health risks and their locomotive impairments increases, requiring a close monitoring and continuous evaluation. Such monitoring should be as noninvasive as possible, in order not to compromise the mobility and the day-to-day activities of citizens. Therefore, we present the development of a noninvasive optical fiber sensor (OFS) architecture adaptable to a shoe sole for plantar pressure remote monitoring, which is suitable to be integrated in an IoT e-Health solution to monitor the well-being of individuals. This paper explores the production of the OFS multiplexed network (using fiber Bragg gratings) to monitor the foot plantar pressure distribution during gait (walking movement). From the acquired gait data, it is possible to infer health conditions of the patient's foot and spine posture. To guarantee the patients mobility, the proposed system consists of an OFS network integrated with a wireless transceiver to enable efficient ubiquitous monitoring of patients. This paper shows the calibration and measurement results, which reflect the accuracy of the proposed system, under normal walking in controlled area.

We propose a novel polymer optical fiber (POF) sensing system based on fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) to measure foot plantar pressure. The plantar pressure signals are detected by five FBGs, in the same piece of cyclic transparent optical polymer (CYTOP) fiber, which are embedded in a cork insole for the dynamic monitoring of gait. The calibration and measurements performed with the suggested system are presented, and the results obtained demonstrate the accuracy and reliability of the sensing platform to monitor the foot plantar pressure distribution during gait motion and the application of pressure. This architecture does not compromise the patient’s mobility nor interfere in their daily activities. The results using the CYTOP fiber showed a very good response when compared with solutions using silica optical fibers, resulting in a sensitivity almost twice as high, with excellent repeatability and ease of handling. The advantages of POF (e.g., high flexibility and robustness) proved that this is a viable solution for this type of application, since POF’s high fracture toughness enables its application in monitoring patients with higher body mass compared with similar systems based on silica fiber. This study has demonstrated the viability of the proposed system based on POF technology as a useful alternative for plantar pressure detection systems.