The study of wearable sensors for human disease monitoring has developed into an important research area due to its potential for personalized health care. Various sensor types have been proposed for assessing the range of joint movement in patients with progressive diseases or following post-surgical treatments. Many of these methods suffer from poor accuracy, sensitivity, and linearity or are very expensive and complex to implement. To overcome some of these limitations, this paper reports on the development of a novel flexible sensor for the measurement of bending by utilizing the Matteucci effect in the amorphous wire. This paper describes a bend sensor that utilizes positive magnetostrictive amorphous wire to achieve a measurement sensitivity equal to 5.68 ± 0.02 mV/cm with a resolution of ±0.2° over a measuring range of 64 to 143°.
Keywords: Matteucci effect; amorphous wire; flexible bending sensor.