OFSETH: Smart medical textile for continuous monitoring of respiratory motions under magnetic resonance imaging

The potential impact of optical fiber sensors embedded into medical textiles for the continuous monitoring of the patient during magnetic resonance imaging is presented. We report on two pure optical sensing technologies for respiratory movements monitoring-a macro bending sensor and a Bragg grating sensor, designed to measure the elongation due to abdominal and thoracic motions during breathing. We demonstrate that the two sensors can successfully sense textile elongation between, 0% and 3%, while maintaining the stretching properties of the textile substrates for a good comfort of the patient.