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.