Optical Fiber-Integrated Smart Structures: Towards Transparent Devices for Healthcare 4.0

The whole world experienced in the last decades a continuous change in the age pyramid related to the population aging, where there is an increase in the elderly population (over 65 years) when compared with other age groups [1]. Such demographic change is not essentially an issue, since it demonstrates that the life expectancy is increasing, directly related to many advances in medicine, public health and biotechnology as well as social and economic developments that allow access for the general population to health treatments [1]. The population aging in conjunction with chronic diseases, where some of them are also age-related, leads to some clinical conditions that can affect human health such as osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and weakness of the skeletal muscles [2]. These clinical conditions can lead to different types of disabilities, and the most common type is locomotion impairment, which occurs with nearly 14% of the world population [3] and represents around 1 billion people. As locomotor impairment harms work performance, activities of daily living and independence in the community, there is a necessity for continuous treatment of the different conditions that result in locomotor impairments.