Fiber Bragg Gratings based smart insole to measure plantar pressure and temperature

Abstract

Various foot complications can be easily avoided by continuous monitoring of foot plantar temperature and pressure. In this work, the design, characterization, and implementation of a Fiber Bragg Gratings (FBG) based smart insole capable of simultaneously measuring plantar pressure and temperature has been reported. The instrumented insole was tested and verified during static and gait exercises. The paper also provides a comparison of the developed optoelectronic-based solution with a commercially available and widely used plantar pressure measurement and analysis system and a lab-made, electronic sensor-based smart insole that can measure both plantar temperature and pressure. It was shown that even though the commercially available expensive system is very robust and highly precise due to many sensing units on the insole, the developed insole with a smaller number of sensors can provide both plantar temperature and pressure with reasonable precision while displaying both foot pressure and temperature maps, and gait cycle plots in real-time. The FBG-based solution is comfortable and safer than the other systems being compared. Thus, confirming the effectiveness of the proposed solution as an addition to the research area for detecting foot complications non-invasively using foot insoles.