Special Session 7

The fourth industrial revolution, known as Industry 4.0, is strongly influencing the way of living and working, the quality of industrial processes and products as well as the healthcare services management and delivery. All these changes are fostering the spread of smart systems in many sectors: such as medical, industry, aerospace, agriculture, and daily life. Many enabling technologies and stakeholders are playing a crucial role within the framework of Industry 4.0. In this context, fiber optic sensors (FOSs) are gathering a growing interest in the field of metrology showing several advantages over the competitors. FOSs are compact, light, highly sensitive, chemically inert, dielectric, non-toxic, immune to electromagnetic interferences, and easily multiplexable. These advanced properties enable the use of FOS in the development of smart systems (such as smart sensors and wearables) for various applications ranging from healthcare and occupational to agriculture and industry scenarios, including harsh environments (e.g., long expositions to voltage and radiation, excessive temperature, and high pressure).
This Special Session aims at addressing the key aspects of FOS-based applications in Industry 4.0 by gathering researchers and practitioners, working in this field, to introduce and discuss their latest scientific results with a main focus on the following topics.

Topics include, but are not limited to:

• Fiber optic sensors and biosensors;
• Metrological assessment of smart systems based on fiber optics;
• 3D-printed fos-based smart systems for human and structural health monitoring;
• Fos-based wearables and flexible sensors for applications in industry, healthcare, precision agricolture, and daily life;
• Contact-based sensing solutions based on fos;
• Environmental stressors detection using fiber optic sensors;
• Injuries prevention and occurance reduction;
• New interrogation and analysis techniques for fos.

Daniela Lo Presti (Ph.D 2021) is currently postdoctoral research fellow at the Unit of Measurements and Biomedical Instrumentation of Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma. Her main research activities focus on the design, fabrication, and feasibility assessment of smart systems and wearables based on fiber Bragg gratings for biomedical applications.

Cátia Leitão, is currently a researcher at the Nanophotonics and Optoeletronics group of i3N, Physics department of University of Aveiro, and is a collaborator of Instituto de Telecomunicações. Her current research interests include photonic and optoelectronic solutions for biomedical sensing, namely physiological and biochemical parameters related to stress and cardiovascular diseases.

M. Fátima Domingues, (Ph.D 2014), is a Researcher at Instituto de Telecomunicações – Aveiro, Portugal, and her current research interests embrace new solutions of photonic based sensors and its application in e-Health scenarios, with a focus in physical rehabilitation architectures. Dr. Domingues authored and co-authored more than +100 journal and conference papers, 5 book chapters and 3 books.