Spectroscopy For Wearables and Human Health (Society for Applied Spectroscopy)

Portable spectroscopy has been a rapidly growing field, being the subject of an extensive review in 2018. In 2021, the whole field of portable spectroscopy and spectrometry, from the technologies and instruments, through to field applications, required a two-volume book to do it justice. Progress in this field continues apace, with ever-smaller instruments and devices. Developments in other fields of optics and photonics are fueling this, and speakers in this symposium will describe some of the newer technologies being applied, and the technologies that could potentially be applied in the near future, and how they can be applied to, fitness products, ‘wearables’ and human health monitoring. Multispectral devices can be produced in volume via semiconductor and optical coating techniques, at very low cost - less than $10 each. Silicon photonics and photonic integrated circuits (PICs), produced en masse using semiconductor manufacturing techniques, are the ideal next step. This spectroscopic miniaturization, and concomitant cost reduction, has reached the point where multispectral sensors can now be incorporated into ‘fitness’ products like smart watches and sports watches, and into ‘wearables’ like smart rings, providing the user with health information, looking towards the ‘Holy Grail’ of a wearable non-invasive (i.e., optical) blood glucose device.