Smart shoe gait analysis and diagnosis: designing and prototyping of hardware and software

Abstract

Gait analysis plays a major role in treatment of osteoarthritis, knee or hip replacements, and musculoskeletal diseases. It is extensively used for injury rehabilitation and physical therapy for issues like Hemiplegia and Diplegia. It also provides us with the information to detect various improper gaits such as Parkinson's disease, Hemiplegic and diplegic gaits. Though there are many wearable and non-wearable methods to detect the improper gate performance, they are usually not user friendly and have restrictions. Most existing devices and systems can detect the gait but are very limited with regards of diagnosing them. The proposed method uses two A201 Force sensing resistors, accelerometer, and gyroscope to detect the gait and send diagnosed information of the possibility of the specified improper gaits via Bluetooth wireless communication system to the user's hand-held device or the desktop. The data received from the sensors was analyzed by the custom made micro-controller and is sent to the desktop or mobile device via Bluetooth module. The peak pressure values during a gait cycle were recorded and were used to indicate if the walk cycle of a person is normal or it has any abnormality.

Future work: A magnetometer can be added to get more accurate results. More improper gaits can be detected by using two PCBs, one under each foot. Data can be sent to cloud and saved for future comparisons.