Gait Sense: A Smart Shoe for Real-Time Gait Monitoring

Abstract

The health monitoring systems that are carried as a wearable have been of great interest as a result of the opportunities presented in healthcare, sports analytics and rehabilitation. This paper introduces Gait sense, a smart shoe strategy powered by the IoT and which is intended to track the gait patterns, the spatial distribution of the pressure of the foot, and the physical activity in real-time. The proposed Gait Sense system integrates three Force Sensitive Resistor (FSR) sensors, an MPU6050 inertial measurement unit, and an ESP32 microcontroller to monitor gait patterns and plantar pressure distribution in real time. The achieved data is processed at the point of collection and transmitted via wirelessly to an online live dashboard in the form of WebSocket communication. Motion and the pressure distribution is intuitively given by an application of a novel visualization technique involving a 3D animated representation of a shoe. The results from the experiments include consistent step counting, classification of activity (idle, walking, running) and the real-time visualization of the activity at low-latency (less than 150 ms). The system offers a versatile, cheap, and extensible system which can be used in health monitoring, performance evaluation and rehabilitation.