Smart Footwear Insole for Recognition of Foot Pronation and Supination Using Neural Networks

Abnormal foot postures during gait are common sources of pain and pathologies of the lower limbs. Measurements of foot plantar pressures in both dynamic and static conditions can detect these abnormal foot postures and prevent possible pathologies. In this work, a plantar pressure measurement system is developed to identify areas with higher or lower pressure load. This system is composed of an embedded system placed in the insole and a user application. The instrumented insole consists of a low-power microcontroller, seven pressure sensors and a low-energy bluetooth module. The user application receives and shows the insole pressure information in real-time and, finally, provides information about the foot posture. In order to identify the different pressure states and obtain the final information of the study with greater accuracy, a Deep Learning neural network system has been integrated into the user application. The neural network can be trained using a stored dataset in order to obtain the classification results in real-time. Results prove that this system provides an accuracy over 90% using a training dataset of 3000+ steps from 6 different users.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TEC2016-77785-

Real-time human ambulation, activity, and physiological monitoring:taxonomy of issues, techniques, applications, challenges and limitations

Automated methods of real-time, unobtrusive, human ambulation, activity, and wellness monitoring and data analysis using various algorithmic techniques have been subjects of intense research. The general aim is to devise effective means of addressing the demands of assisted living, rehabilitation, and clinical observation and assessment through sensor-based monitoring. The research studies have resulted in a large amount of literature. This paper presents a holistic articulation of the research studies and offers comprehensive insights along four main axes: distribution of existing studies; monitoring device framework and sensor types; data collection, processing and analysis; and applications, limitations and challenges. The aim is to present a systematic and most complete study of literature in the area in order to identify research gaps and prioritize future research directions

A low-cost podoscope for extracting morphological features of the foot

Foot morphology evaluation techniques are commonly used to evaluate foot abnormalities. The foot is essential for keeping the biomechanical performance of the lower extremities. It is responsible for the support of body balance and stability during gait. For the qualitative examination of foot morphology, many podoscopes have been designed. However, these podoscopes are mainly expensive, complex to operate, and have low accessibility. As a consequence the goal of this research was to create a simple, low-cost podoscope to assess the plantar footprint. In addition to providing a visual representation of the supporting regions. The proposed system enables accurate estimation of clinical indexes of foot deformities. With bare feet, bipedal support, and orthostatic posture, The participant was placed on the podoscope. Doom camera was used to capture the image of the plantar of the foot, and the data was sent to a computer via LAN connection. Based on image processing techniques, the proposed podoscope can automatically estimate the Arch Index, the Chippaux-Smirak Index, the Staheli Index, and Wejsflog's index.Ten samples were tested by the proposed podoscope, and the calculated parameters defining foot deformities are presented. The proposed podoscope appears to have the advantages of simplicity, being portable, inexpensive enabling rapid and precise footprint assessment with correct diagnoses, as well as a record for future assessments, and being economically viable in countries with people having low socio-economic status

Deep Learning in Left and Right Footprint Image Detection Based on Plantar Pressure

People with cerebral palsy (CP) suffer primarily from lower-limb impairments. These impairments contribute to the abnormal performance of functional activities and ambulation. Footprints, such as plantar pressure images, are usually used to assess functional performance in people with spastic CP. Detecting left and right feet based on footprints in people with CP is a challenge due to abnormal foot progression angle and abnormal footprint patterns. Identifying left and right foot profiles in people with CP is essential to provide information on the foot orthosis, walking problems, index gait patterns, and determination of the dominant limb. Deep learning with object detection can localize and classify the object more precisely on the abnormal foot progression angle and complex footprints associated with spastic CP. This study proposes a new object detection model to auto-determine left and right footprints. The footprint images successfully represented the left and right feet with high accuracy in object detection. YOLOv4 more successfully detected the left and right feet using footprint images compared to other object detection models. YOLOv4 reached over 99.00% in various metric performances. Furthermore, detection of the right foot (majority of people’s dominant leg) was more accurate than that of the left foot (majority of people’s non-dominant leg) in different object detection model

Application of Smart Insoles for Recognition of Activities of Daily Living: A Systematic Review

Recent years have witnessed the increasing literature on using smart insoles in health and well-being, and yet, their capability of daily living activity recognition has not been reviewed. This paper addressed this need and provided a systematic review of smart insole-based systems in the recognition of Activities of Daily Living (ADLs). The review followed the PRISMA guidelines, assessing the sensing elements used, the participants involved, the activities recognised, and the algorithms employed. The findings demonstrate the feasibility of using smart insoles for recognising ADLs, showing their high performance in recognising ambulation and physical activities involving the lower body, ranging from 70% to 99.8% of Accuracy, with 13 studies over 95%. The preferred solutions have been those including machine learning. A lack of existing publicly available datasets has been identified, and the majority of the studies were conducted in controlled environments. Furthermore, no studies assessed the impact of different sampling frequencies during data collection, and a trade-off between comfort and performance has been identified between the solutions. In conclusion, real-life applications were investigated showing the benefits of smart insoles over other solutions and placing more emphasis on the capabilities of smart insoles

A deep learning method for foot-type classification using plantar pressure images

Background: Flat foot deformity is a prevalent and challenging condition often leading to various clinical complications. Accurate identification of abnormal foot types is essential for appropriate interventions.Method: A dataset consisting of 1573 plantar pressure images from 125 individuals was collected. The performance of the You Only Look Once v5 (YOLO-v5) model, improved YOLO-v5 model, and multi-label classification model was evaluated for foot type identification using the collected images. A new dataset was also collected to verify and compare the models.Results: The multi-label classification algorithm based on ResNet-50 outperformed other algorithms. The improved YOLO-v5 model with Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE), the improved YOLO-v5 model with Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM), and the multilabel classification model based on ResNet-50 achieved an accuracy of 0.652, 0.717, and 0.826, respectively, which is significantly higher than those obtained using the ordinary plantar-pressure system and the standard YOLO-v5 model.Conclusion: These results indicate that the proposed DL-based multilabel classification model based on ResNet-50 is superior in flat foot type detection and can be used to evaluate the clinical rehabilitation status of patients with abnormal foot types and various foot pathologies when more data on patients with various diseases are available for training

Plantar pressure image fusion for comfort fusion in diabetes mellitus using an improved fuzzy hidden Markov model

Diabetes mellitus is a clinical syndrome caused by the interaction of genetic and environmental factors. The change of plantar pressure in diabetic patients is one of the important reasons for the occurrence of diabetic foot. The abnormal increase of plantar pressure is a predictor of the common occurrence of foot ulcers. The feature extraction of plantar pressure distribution will be beneficial to the design and manufacture of diabetic shoes that will be beneficial for early protection of Diabetes mellitus patients. In this research, texture-based features of the Angular Second Moment (ASM), Moment of Inertia (MI), Inverse Difference Monument (IDM), and Entropy (E) have been selected and fused by using the an up-down algorithm. The fused features are normalized to predict comfort plantar pressure imaging dataset using an improved Fuzzy Hidden Markov Model (FHMM). In FHMM, type-I fuzzy set is proposed and Fuzzy Baum-Welch algorithm is also applied to estimate the next features. The results are discussed, and by comparing with other back-forward algorithms and different fusion operations in FHMM. Improved HMMs with up-down fusion using type-I fuzzy definition performs high effectiveness in prediction comfort plantar pressure distribution in an image dataset with an accuracy of 82.2% and the research will be applied to the shoe-last personalized customization in the industry

Recognizing Different Foot Deformities Using FSR Sensors by Static Classification of Neural Networks

تُعَدُّ أنظمة النعال الحسّاسة للحركة تقنية واعدة للعديد من التطبيقات في الرعاية الصحية والرياضة. حيث يمكن أن توفّر هذه الأنظمة معلومات قيّمة حول توزيع الضغط على القدم وأنماط المشي لأفراد مختلفين. ومع ذلك، فإن تصميم وتنفيذ مثل هذه الأنظمة يواجه العديد من التحديات، مثل اختيار الحسّاسات والمعايرة ومعالجة البيانات والتفسير. في هذه الدراسة، نقترح نظام نعل حساس باستخدام مقاومات استشعار القوى  لقياس الضغط المطبّق من القدم على مناطق مختلفة من النعل. يقوم هذا النظام بتصنيف أربعة أنواع من تشوهات القدم: طبيعي، مسطح، انحراف القدم إلى الداخل، وزيادة انحراف القدم إلى الخارج. تستخدم مرحلة التصنيف قيم الضغط الفرقية على نقاط الضغط كمدخلات لنموذج التغذية الأمامية للشبكات العصبية. تم جمع البيانات من 60 فرداً تم تشخيصهم بالحالات المدروسة. حقق تنفيذ التغذية الأمامية للشبكات العصبية دقة بنسبة 96.6٪ باستخدام 50٪ من المجموعة البيانية كبيانات تدريبية و 92.8٪ باستخدام 30٪ من البيانات التدريبية فقط. ويوضح المقارنة مع الأعمال ذات الصلة الأثر الإيجابي لاستخدام القيم الفرق لنقاط الضغط كمدخلات للشبكات العصبية مقارنة بالبيانات الأولية.Sensing insole systems are a promising technology for various applications in healthcare and sports. They can provide valuable information about the foot pressure distribution and gait patterns of different individuals. However, designing and implementing such systems poses several challenges, such as sensor selection, calibration, data processing, and interpretation. This paper proposes a sensing insole system that uses force-sensitive resistors (FSRs) to measure the pressure exerted by the foot on different regions of the insole. This system classifies four types of foot deformities: normal, flat, over-pronation, and excessive supination. The classification stage uses the differential values of pressure points as input for a feedforward neural network (FNN) model. Data acquisition involved 60 subjects diagnosed with the studied cases. The implementation of FNN achieved an accuracy of 96.6% using 50% of the dataset as training data and 92.8% using only 30% training data. The comparison with related work shows good impact of using the differential values of pressure points as input for neural networks compared with raw data