Trends in fibre-optic uses for personal healthcare and clinical diagnostics

Abstract

Along this chapter, a different point of view on the sensing uses of optical fibre is shown, focusing on its applicability to medical diagnostics. A wide majority of the fibre-optic-based structures described in this book can be used in medicine. But there are some challenges for fibre-optics to be fulfilled in the future when talking about healthcare. First, current society strongly demands day-by-day applications. This means, technologies that permit their use ‘on the go’ such as wearables or their integration in our smartphones. Second, due to the reduced dimensions of the optical fibre, there is an increasing interest in introducing it into the body, as it occurs when using catheters or fibrescopes. Moreover, the need for analysing biological substances makes it crucial to use reduced size devices that permit their interaction with the biomolecules, once the samples have been extracted from the patient. And of course, all the addressed applications must be achieved in order to search for cheap devices that work under exigent conditions. The main goal of this chapter is to search for those applications that will lead us to use fibre-optics for self-healthcare and diagnose patients in the next times.