SPECIAL SESSION #04

Daniela Lo Presti

University Campus Bio-Medico of Roma, Italy

• d.lopresti@unicampus.it

Simone Pasinetti

University of Brescia, Italy

• simone.pasinetti@unibs.it

Optical sensing technologies are becoming key enablers for quantitative assessment in life sciences and environmental monitoring, thanks to their ability to deliver unobtrusive, non-destructive, and real-time measurements. From wearable optical systems for physiological monitoring in humans to spectral and imaging sensors for assessing plant health and productivity, optical metrology provides a powerful framework for reliable and traceable measurements in living systems.

Despite this rapid expansion, both contact and non-contact approaches still face important metrological bottlenecks:

• Contact systems (e.g., wearables on the skin, probes placed on plants) are exposed to motion artefacts, surface deformation, variability of the sensor–tissue interface, and local mechanical/thermal perturbations that degrade repeatability;
• Non-contact systems reduce invasiveness and allow remote, large-area sensing, but they are highly sensitive to ambient light, scattering effects, surface optical heterogeneity, geometry, and distance, making calibration, uncertainty modelling and traceability extremely challenging.

This Special Session aims to bring together contributions addressing these measurement, calibration, and traceability challenges in optical sensing for human and plant applications, highlighting methodological advances, standardization efforts, and metrological validation of both contact-based and non-contact approaches. It will gather contributions that address these challenges, showcasing methods, protocols, standardization efforts, metrological validation and uncertainty modelling for optical sensing applied to humans and plants.

We aim at linking measurement science, photonics, AI, data fusion, and field/clinical validation, to accelerate the adoption of robust optical sensing solutions in real operational scenarios.

Paper submissions are welcome on (but not limited to) the following topics:

• Optical metrology for biological systems;
• Contact-based optical measurements;
• Non-contact optical measurements;
• Comparison and validation of sensing methods;
• Calibration procedures and reference standards;
• Uncertainty evaluation and traceability;
• Spectroscopic, imaging, and photonic techniques;
• Data fusion and AI-assisted processing;
• Environmental and biological variability;
• Industrial and field applications.

Daniela Lo Presti (Ph.D 2021) is currently Assistant Professor in Mechanical and Thermal Measurements 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 optics for application in smart healthcare and agriculture.

Simone Pasinetti (Ph.D 2015) works in the Mechanical and Thermal Measurement Laboratory (MMTLAB) at University of Brescia. Since 2020 he is an Assistant Professor in Mechanical and Thermal Measurements at the University of Brescia, Italy. He is currently the Head of the Vision Systems for Mechatronic and Agriculture division of the MMTLAB. He has a strong background in developing and characterizing vision systems and algorithms based both on deterministic and advanced (i.e. machine and deep learning vision processing) machine vision. In recent years, his main research interests include vision and measurement systems for the agriculture and food industries.