Development of a wireless electronic shoe for walking abnormalities detection

Abstract

This work portrays the development of wireless smart shoe for gait analysis. Force sensitive resistors (FSRs) and resistive bend sensor were employed by mounting onto a shoe for detection of pressure distribution beneath the foot during normal and abnormal walking. In the present study, we have been interested in 3 walking postures including normal walking, tip-toe walking and dragging foot walking. Wireless sensor network (WSN) based on ZigBee technology was employed in this work for data communication. The Principal component analysis (PCA) was used for pattern recognition in the analysis part. It was shown that the smart shoe was successful to classify between normal gait pattern and some abnormal gait patterns. ©2012 IEEE.