Pilot Experiments of Side-Emitting Fiber-Based Optical Camera Communication for Wearable Applications

We demonstrate for the first time the application of LED-based optical camera communication using a side-emitting fiber in wearable applications. A 1.2-m long plastic side-emitting fiber with a 4-mm outer diameter acts as a distributed transmitter. The side-emitting fiber is attached to a T-shirt over the shoulder with a 50-cm section of the fiber both on the front and back side of the T-shirt. This expands the possibilities of data detection by the rolling shutter camera. The light from a white LED is coupled into the side-emitting fiber with LED on-off keying (OOK) modulation frequencies of 2.64 kHz, 3.54 kHz, and 5.31 kHz. The results show bit error rate bellow 3.8 • 10 ⁻³ for up to 200 cm fiber to camera distance.