Design and Realization of a totally Embedded smart Insole

Abstract

Because of their professional activities, athletes use a personalized insole in order to get the best performance while practicing. To develop a personalized insole, athletes' gait must be measured first and then an efficient personalized insole can be developed based on the gathered information from the measurement results. Therefore, a reliable measurement of the gait is necessary. There has been extensive research conducted to measure people's gaits, but they usually need to be done in an equipped laboratory imposing artificial constraints, which causes, in most cases, to get non-realistic measurement results. The long purpose of this research is to create a shoe pad with embedded sensitive electronics that can be placed in a shoe to measure and store an athlete's gait information without imposing any artificial constraints to be used in designing an efficient personalized insole for the athlete. However, as the first step of the research, in this paper, an in-shoe insole consisting selective number of force sensitive resistors is introduced, developed, and validated under static condition. Choosing silicone as the material for the shoe pad and force sensors for data acquisition, a prototype shoe pad was to measure the weight distribution for the different sections of the foot. A computer program was developed to visually depict the force distribution of the foot. To validate the capability of the created insole in measuring the desired data, weight distribution of a healthy person with a normal foot force distribution was measured experimentally. Collected data from sensors embedded under selected areas, as the candidates of highest pressure bearing areas of foot sole, complies with the expectations as from the literature. This indicates that a viable shoe pad as described could indeed be made, and utilized to gather data from the person's gait usable in making an efficient personalized insole.