Soft Polymer Fiber-Optic Sensors for Intelligent Touchpad Applications

In this study, we propose a soft polymer optical fiber (POF) sensor for sensitive and robust mechanical deformation recognition. The multimodal sensor enables high-precision detection of various mechanical deformations, including tensile, bending, and pressing, by capturing real-time light intensity changes of POF sensors. We demonstrate an intelligent touchpad by leveraging the intrinsic correlation of adjacent sensors assisted by a machine learning algorithm. The proposed device can identify more than 100 pressing positions in real-time with an accuracy rate of up to 99.88%. Our soft sensors can find applications in human-machine interaction interfaces.