Low-cost wearable measurement system for continuous real-time pedobarography

Abstract

Pedobarography is fundamental for kinetic gait analysis and for diagnosis and investigation of a number of neurological and musculoskeletal diseases, such as peripheral neuropathy or Parkinson. Wearable plantar pressure sensing systems represent a powerful tool in this field. The continuous data they can provide are crucial for rehabilitation, sport applications, and to generate real-time alarms for foot ulceration prevention of neuropathic patients. Requirements of compactness, spatial resolution, range and power-consumption lead to the high cost of commercially available pedobarographic systems, which represents the major issue hindering their widespread use. Efforts of the authors' work are therefore aimed at the realization of a single system able to match all these requirements while overcoming the cost issue. This work presents a high-spatial-resolution, flexible system enabling wide-dynamic-range pressure measurements with different sensing materials, and suitable for both platforms and low-cost sensing insoles embeddable into normal shoes. Experimental tests and comparisons adopting an in-house developed piezoresistive substrate and a commercial sensing material are presented and discussed.