Instrumented Shoes for Real-Time Activity Monitoring Applications

Activity monitoring in daily life is gaining momentum as a health assessment tool, especially in older adults and at-risk populations. Several research-based and commercial systems have been proposed with varying performances in classification accuracy. Configurations with many sensors are generally accurate but cumbersome, whereas single sensors tend to have lower accuracies. To this end, we propose an instrumented shoes system capable of accurate activity classification and gait analysis that contains sensors located entirely at the level of the shoes. One challenge in daily activity monitoring is providing punctual and subject-tailored feedback to improve mobility. Therefore, the instrumented shoe system was equipped with a Bluetooth (R) module to transmit data to a smartphone and perform detailed activity profiling of the monitored subjects. The potential applications of such a system are numerous in mobility and fall risk-assessment as well as in fall prevention.