CHARACTERIZATION AND VALIDATION OF A WEARABLE FBG-BASED FOREARM BAND FOR BIOMECHANICAL ANALYSIS OF WRIST MOTION

The ability to monitor and classify hand and wrist gestures with wearable devices has broad relevance across clinical rehabilitation, prosthetic limb control, and human-robot interaction. Optical fiber sensors based on Fiber Bragg Grating technology offer a complementary sensing modality: they are lightweight, immune to electromagnetic interference, and capable of measuring the mechanical deformation of forearm soft tissue that accompanies muscle contraction. This thesis investigates whether a forearm band array of FBG sensors, combined with an inertial ground truth for joint kinematics, can capture gesture-specific strain patterns on the forearm with sufficient spatial selectivity and repeatability to serve as the basis for future gesture recognition systems.