A Fsr Based Data Acquisition System to Study the Interaction of Different Footwear with Different Foot-Regions

Abstract

This article describes the design and development of a data acquisition system to capture the effect of footwear on human foot & gait cycle. It involves the calculation of Duty Cycle & Period of force-sensing resistors (FSR) which are mounted on right and left foot insoles. Two FSR sensors are placed at the fore-foot, one FSR sensor is placed at mid-foot and one FSR sensor is placed at rear-foot. An op-amp based FSR current-to-voltage converter circuit is designed and corresponding voltage data of each force-sensing resistors are collected using an AVR based SD Card module. Duty cycle & Period is calculated from the data stored in the SD Card module using MATLAB software and further processed to obtain the mean, standard deviation & kurtosis of each FSR sensor. In this exploratory study 3 Male participants are instructed to walk on Grassy Surface and Concrete Surface wearing 3 different footwear i.e. Sports shoe, Causal shoe and Sandal at different rates as walking and jogging while wearing the FSR mounted insoles. Anova Tests and subsequent T-Tests on the statistical parameters of duty cycle shows significant (α = 0.05) variation among different foot regions for the three different footwear with varying degree. These results indicate that our foot is affected by different types of footwear while walking and jogging on different surfaces affecting the Gait pattern of the participant's foot at Stance phase of the Gait cycle, which determines the dynamic characteristic of human locomotion.