Design and Application of Optical Fiber Sensors for Force Myography

The force myography (FMG) is a method for retrieving the hand movements by assessing the radial forces exerted by the forearm muscles. In this context, optical fiber transducers based on different principles (microbending, LPFG, specklegram, and hetero-core structure) are evaluated for the measurement of FMG signals. Furthermore, the microbending transducer was applied on gesture recognition for the real-time control of a virtual prosthetic hand. The sensor presented ~0.05 N
^-1
sensitivity for a 20 N range and was successfully implemented on the classification of 4 postures, providing a low-cost and reliable approach for controlling multi-grasp bionic hands.