PI-Sole: A Low-Cost Solution for Gait Monitoring Using Off-The-Shelf Piezoelectric Sensors and IMU.

Abstract

In this paper, viability of low-cost off-the-shelf Piezoelectric ceramic disc elements is explored for an insole-based gait monitoring system, `PI-Sole' (Piezo In-Sole). Piezoelectric elements can sense dynamic changes in pressure in a closed-loop environment with good sensitivity and a wide measurement range. In this paper, method to enable these elements to continuously sense plantar pressure while walking is proposed, making them a very cost-efficient alternative to the widely used Force Sensing Resistors (FSR) and pressure plates for monitoring human gait. However, piezoelectric elements show hysteresis in their force response, inducing a drift in calculated pressure which increases with time. A novel and effective method to perform detrending of the signal is also presented utilizing stride contexts from a 6-DoF Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and the same is utilized to perform zero-correction in the pressure data. 3-D trajectories of strides are calculated using the IMU, and parameters like stride length, stride height etc. are further derived. In order to test the validity of our proposed methods, important kinetic parameters like Vertical Ground Reaction Force (VGRF) and Center of Pressure (CoP) are calculated using PI-Sole and compared to the ones calculated using FSR's in multiple prior works. Applicability of PI-Sole is demonstrated further by depicting and analysing characteristic differences between a heel-strike toe-off stance type, and a flat-strike stance type, the latter being one of the primary symptoms in many cases of pathological gait, including Parkinsonian gait. Important artefacts from foot's height profile while walking are analysed for both stance types in context of standard gait events. We report a mean error of 2.8cm in stride length calculation, and a mean accuracy of 94.5% in calculating swing/stance duration of gait cycles.