Wearable Shaped Side-Emitting Fiber Transmitters for Optical Camera Communication

Wearable communication is one of the key drivers in the Internet of Things (IoT) and body area networks for transmitting vital sensory data. Wearable devices must be lightweight, flexible, and have low energy consumption. In this context, optical wireless communication offers several significant advantages, such as immunity to the radio frequency-induced electromagnetic interference, broad unlicensed spectrum, and enhanced physical layer security. Wearable devices employing light-emitting diodes coupled to side-emitting optical fibers form energy-efficient, lightweight, flexible, and omnidirectional distributed optical transmitters, which are ideal for IoT applications. In this paper, we propose an optical camera communication (OCC)–based wearable system with a unique image processing algorithm capable of detecting and recovering data from distributed transmitters of arbitrary shapes. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed system, where for distances up to 4 m, the bit error rate (BER) performance is well below the forward error correction BER limit with values as low as ${5.5} {\times }\text {10}^{ {-}\text {5}}$. The presented results demonstrate the potential of OCC-based systems using side-emitting fibers for IoT applications.