Development of an in-shoe pressure-sensitive device for gait analysis (original) (raw)

Design of wireless device to measure plantar pressure and gait analysis

Journal of Innovations in Engineering Education

Foot plantar pressure is the pressure field that acts between the plantar region of the foot and supporting ground. The pressure exerted on the variable region of the foot can be determined using discrete pressure sensors. Information obtained from these sensors is useful in the measurement of gait and posture for diagnosing various problems associated with a lower limb, footwear design, and sports biomechanics. This project is aimed to design a portable in-shoe plantar pressure and gyroscope-based gait angle measurement system. Six Force Sensitive Resistor (FSR) placed in the sole (hallux, 1st, 5th metatarsal, midfoot lateral, midfoot medial and heel respectively) detects the plantar pressure and gyroscope placed at the ankle, knee and hip help measure the orientation and angle of joint movement during various phases of gait. The study among 16 male and 16 female subjects illustrated the significant pressure variation (p<0.0001, t=5.17 with α=95%). Similarly, there was a signifi...

A Wireless Flexible Sensorized Insole for Gait Analysis

Sensors, 2014

This paper introduces the design and development of a novel pressure-sensitive foot insole for real-time monitoring of plantar pressure distribution during walking. The device consists of a flexible insole with 64 pressure-sensitive elements and an integrated electronic board for high-frequency data acquisition, pre-filtering, and wireless transmission to a remote data computing/storing unit. The pressure-sensitive technology is based on an optoelectronic technology developed at Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna. The insole is a low-cost and low-power battery-powered device. The design and development of the device is presented along with its experimental characterization and validation with healthy subjects performing a task of walking at different speeds, and benchmarked against an instrumented force platform.

Foot Plantar Pressure Measurement System: A Review

Sensors, 2012

Foot plantar pressure is the pressure field that acts between the foot and the support surface during everyday locomotor activities. Information derived from such pressure measures is important in gait and posture research for diagnosing lower limb problems, footwear design, sport biomechanics, injury prevention and other applications. This paper reviews foot plantar sensors characteristics as reported in the literature in addition to foot plantar pressure measurement systems applied to a variety of research problems. Strengths and limitations of current systems are discussed and a wireless foot plantar pressure system is proposed suitable for measuring high pressure distributions under the foot with high accuracy and reliability. The novel system is based on highly linear pressure sensors with no hysteresis.

A Review in Detection and Monitoring Gait Disorders Using In-Shoe Plantar Measurement Systems

IEEE Reviews in Biomedical Engineering, 2017

Gait is an important part of our life, as it affects many daily activities. Special footwear is fundamental to obtain an ergonomic gait and to extract data for analysis. The plantar foot pressure can be employed to detect many kinds of disorders, suggest improvements in treatments, rehabilitation tasks, patient monitoring, development of orthopedic devices, and other applications. In recent years, attention to this topic has grown and is reflected in many works issued in both commercial and academic groups, and has focused on the development of devices for foot plantar pressure measurement with applications in medicine, sports, and research. First works on this subject appeared around 1963 and have continuously evolved with emerging technologies. This paper reviews the reported developments in the field of footwear-embedded sensors for gait measurement, monitoring, diagnosis, and analysis in rehabilitation. Future work is proposed to improve the field of measurement of the footprint with electronic devices.

A portable insole plantar pressure measurement system

The Journal of Rehabilitation Research and Development, 1992

To analyze plantar pressures during activities of daily living, one needs a fully portable system capable of measuring many steps over extended periods. This paper presents an inexpensive, reliable, portable plantar pressure acquisition system which we have developed. It allows the long-term recording (up to 2 hours) of pressure-time data from 14 pressure sensors within insoles. The sensor chosen is an inexpensive, conductive polymer sensor that is only 0.25 mm thick yet able to withstand sudden overloads. The portable, battery-powered, microprocessorbased data acquisition system has a memory space of 480 kbytes for data storage. It can collect pressure data from 14 insole sensors at a 20 Hz sample frequency for 5 seconds every minute over a 2-hour period. It enables the long-term measurement of plantar pressures during normal activities in a natural unrestricted environment. The design and development of this portable insole plantar pressure measurement system is described.

Wireless Foot Plantar Pressure Measurement Instrument for Medical Diagnostic

Foot plantar pressure is the pressure field that acts between the foot and the support surface during everyday loco-motor activities. Information derived from pressure measures is important in gait and posture research for diagnosing lower limb problems, footwear design, sport biomechanics, injury prevention and other applications. In this paper, a wireless sensor system equipped with Force Sensing Resistors (FSR) is developed to measure plantar pressure. The wireless sensors proved its high accuracy and reliability for measuring high pressure distributions under the foot in real time. The sensed data are collected wirelessly to the base station (BS). This later displays in real time the data on a Graphical User Interface (GUI). Index Terms—foot plantar pressure; pressure sensor; wireless system; MSP430.

An Intelligent Shoe-Integrated System for Plantar Pressure Measurement

— An intelligent shoe-integrated system has been developed to measure both the pressure distribution under eight special plantar regions and the mean plantar pressure during a subject's normal walking. The system mainly consists of 8 force sensing resistors (FSRs) arranged under bony prominences of each foot, a main board based on microprocessor, and a radio frequency (RF) wireless communication module. The digital sampling frequency is 50 Hz which is adequate for the activity of walking. This system is based on support vector machine (SVM) regression for learning the relationship between eight FSR values and the corresponding mean pressure acquired by Pedar insole system (Novel, Munich). Experimental results show that the system can achieve accurate mean pressure estimation with small mean squared error (MSE). Our goal is to provide a reliable and cost-effective system for predicting the value of mean plantar pressure in order to assist patients with musculoskeletal and neurological disorders in the development of normal gait in their daily life.

Modelling and measurement of a wireless foot plantar pressure

2013

Foot plantar pressure is the pressure fields that act between the foot skin and its supporting surface that humans experience during daily activities. Information derived from such pressure is important for diagnosing lower limb problems, footwear design, sport biomechanics performance and injury prevention. This paper presents the design and implementation of a wireless data acquisition (DAQ) for foot plantar pressure sensors. The system is intended for an in-shoe wireless pressure measurement system. The objective of this DAQ is to be a system which can be integrated into a shoe with the ability of wireless transmission to an external on body receiver. Such device provides low power consumption, convenient and comfortable testing system simulating a range of normal daily life

Design of Low Cost Smart Insole for Real Time Measurement of Plantar Pressure

Procedia Technology, 2015

Real time plantar pressure provides information critical to the understanding of gait mechanics and has a wide range of applications. In this study, smart insoles were designed and developed to measure real time foot plantar pressure. Key features of the insoles included cost-effectiveness, good working pressure detection range, wireless data transfer and real-time data analysis. Calibration of the sensing material was done and the resulting accuracy of the insoles was compared to that of a Kistler force plate, achieving an r 2 value of 0.981. Real-time visualization of pressure mapping was incorporated to enable intuitive understanding of relative plantar pressure distribution.