Development of a fibre Bragg grating sensor for in-shoe shear stress measurement: design and preliminary results.

In-shoe shear stress sensors are a required tool for the investigation of plantar ulcer development after the onset of diabetes. Recently, several transducers have been developed for measuring in-shoe shear stress using magneto-resistive technology, light intensity modulation, and copolymer piezoelectric materials. Common drawbacks in the previous methods are the relatively large size of the sensors and the difficulty in interrogating many sensors simultaneously in order to achieve distributed sensing. In this paper we demonstrate for the first time a shear stress sensor using Fibre Bragg gratings (FBG). The small size and the multiplexing capability of FBGs enables quasi-distributed sensing of shear stress on the plantar surface by interrogating a large number of identical sensors. The sensor design is based on the theory of elastic bending of columns. The sensor consists of two FBGs fitted inside a metallic structure which is able to deform elastically under shear stress. This elastic deformation produces strain on the FBGs, which can be detected by measuring the Bragg wavelength shift of the reflected light of each FBG using a CCD spectrometer. Preliminary results on an enlarged version of the sensor have shown the applicability of FBGs for the implementation of the in-shoe sensor.