Design and Evaluation of a Wearable Optical Sensor for Monitoring Seated Spinal Posture

This work describes the development and evaluation of a wearable plastic optical fiber (POF) sensor for monitoring seated spinal posture. A garment-integrated POF sensor was developed and tested on nine healthy subjects, and its performance compared to data taken simultaneously from a marker-based motion capture system. Sensor performance correlated strongly with motion-capture data with an average r of 0.913. Results show that the wearable sensor provides enough accuracy of measurement to reliably monitor seated spinal posture.