Low-cost wearable measurement system for continuous real-time pedobarography

Pedobarography is fundamental for kinetic gait analysis and for diagnosis and investigation of a number of neurological and musculoskeletal diseases, such as peripheral neuropathy or Parkinson. Wearable plantar pressure sensing systems represent a powerful tool in this field. The continuous data they can provide are crucial for rehabilitation, sport applications, and to generate real-time alarms for foot ulceration prevention of neuropathic patients. Requirements of compactness, spatial resolution, range and power-consumption lead to the high cost of commercially available pedobarographic systems, which represents the major issue hindering their widespread use. Efforts of the authors´ work are therefore aimed at the realization of a single system able to match all these requirements while overcoming the cost issue. This work presents a high-spatial-resolution, flexible system enabling wide-dynamic-range pressure measurements with different sensing materials, and suitable for both platforms and low-cost sensing insoles embeddable into normal shoes. Experimental tests and comparisons adopting an in-house developed piezoresistive substrate and a commercial sensing material are presented and discussed.