Healthcare shoe system for gait monitoring and foot odor detections

Abstract

Recently, we are living in an era filled with unprecedentedly growing senior population. Nowadays, smart technologies for healthcare have been increasingly interested by general consumers due to their numerous advantages such as affordability, user-friendliness, point-of-care usability and social-ability. In this paper, we have developed a smart shoe system with ability to observe human gait patterns and foot odor. The motion pattern and foot odor measurement systems were installed inside the shoes using force sensitive resistors (FRSs), bending sensors and chemical gas sensors. Thereby the FRSs and bending-sensor were installed beneath the foot while chemical gas sensor array was installed inside the tongue of the shoes. In addition, zigbee technology was used as data communication between all sensors with a receiver USB-connected to a computer. This system was developed to be consumer-friendly having a compact size and using low-cost technologies. It was demonstrated that this wearable device could classify different types of human gait patterns and foot odors during the duration of wearing time. © 2013 IEEE.