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

Abstract

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.

Design of a Digital Triaxial Force Sensor for Plantar Load Measurements

“…1(a)) is far less studied despite it being strongly linked to the development of attributes like plantar callus and ulceration [8], [9]. This is primarily due to the lack of available measurement tools; no commercial systems are capable of plantar shear stress measurement and few research systems exist [7], [10], [11]. Consequently, there is a need for research into multiaxial sensor systems which can measure pressure and shear stress across the plantar surface of the foot.…”

Self-Compensated Driving Circuit for Reducing Drift and Hysteresis in Force Sensing Resistors

“…The circuits shown in Figures 3 and 5 can drive a single FSR, but multiple FSRs can be simultaneously handled if multiplexers are employed [22,37]. Before proceeding with the experimental results, it is necessary to discuss the relationship between the applied stress, σ, and the parameters s, R FSR , C FSR , and f. The inter-particle separation, s, is reduced for larger stresses, and consequently, Equation (2) and Equations (4)-(6) predict a lower R FSR for incremental stresses. Conversely, C FSR grows for larger σ as predicted by Equation (9).…”

“…FSRs can be fashioned into multiple shapes and dimensions to fulfill the requirements of a given final application [1][2][3]; this can be done by simply cutting the nanocomposite film after the production process is done, followed by electrode positioning and wiring to assemble the final force sensor [4]. The nanocomposite film is obtained by randomly dispersing conductive particles in an insulating polymer matrix [5][6][7].…”

A Review of Wearable Sensor Systems to Monitor Plantar Loading in the Assessment of Diabetic Foot Ulcers

“…The Cleveland Clinic Plate and related studies by Yavuz et al [17], [54] have thus been key in informing the development of wearable plantar measurement systems and research continues, for instance in 2016 Keatsamarn and Pintavirooj [109] implemented a lowcost camera-based system to capture plantar pressure images. However, our focus in this review is the latter category of wearable footwear-based systems, an area which has received increasing attention for plantar stress measurements over recent years [46], [47], [72], [73], [110].…”

“…Previous reviews in this area have examined tactile sensor technology [44], [45], use of plantar pressure to diagnose disease and gait disorders [46], [47], physiological aspects of DFU formation [48] and plantar pressure measurement in general terms [49]- [52]. In this paper, we seek to build on these works, providing an engineering perspective on recent developments of wearable technology for plantar stress measurement in the diabetic foot.…”