In order to avoid that, Sensuron does work inspired by the necessity of forward motion. Sensuron CEO Michael Heflin explained some of the ideas behind the company in February, after they were first brought to our attention at Embedded Tech Trends in January.

“What people continuously find is that they reach a point where they have innovated beyond what they test. It takes a significant failure for them to say, or us to admit, that this is a human issue, not a hardware issue,” Heflin said.

This, Heflin said, is the primary reason people come to Sensuron – they stop thinking what they have is good enough.

And fiber optics, Heflin said, helps them keep up.

Thousands of sensors can be housed on a single fiber, allowing for more data points and more possible types of readings. In particular, Sensuron and their partners at NASA Armstrong use fiber Bragg gratings, which are placed along the length of the fiber.

“We’re able to read each of those reflected light signals and differentiate one after another and be able to understand two things: strain and temperature values,” Heflin said. By determining those, they can find out many other things, including how much liquid is in a fuel tank based on the different thermal properties between liquid and air. Some users put coatings on the fiber that react to different environmental elements, such as magnetism or chemical reactions.

This is advantageous because it could take months to lay out one hundred or one thousand strain guages. With Sensuron’s technology, over a thousand could be set up in a day.

In aviation, aircraft wings can be threaded with sensors in order to monitor structural health, strain, or other measurements. Fiber optic sensors can also measure deflection, the three-dimensional shape of the fiber, which is particularly useful in medical applications or other structures that bend.