Relationship between fatigue and foot pressure while walking

Fall-related injuries are a serious public health issue among elderly people in developed countries. More than a third of elderly people fall each year. When an elderly person falls, the social costs will be high since falls can yield bone fractures and even death. The gait of the elderly is strongly associated with multiple factors including fatigue, balance, and speed. People at high risk of falls tend to show high gait variability, and a key determiner of this variability, physical fatigue, is difficult to for the user to understand by himself. We are targeting the distribution of the center of pressure (COP) of the foot as a fatigue metric. Experiments measure normal and fatigued gait. COP analysis elucidates the changes that occur when we are fatigued. In addition, there is the possibility of estimating the degree of fatigue. By using a wearable foot pressure sensor, gait data can be continuously gathered in everyday life, and the fall risk can be fed back to the user.