A Review in Detection and Monitoring Gait Disorders Using In-Shoe Plantar Measurement Systems

Gait is an important part of our life, as it affects many daily activities. Special footwear is fundamental to obtain an ergonomic gait and to extract data for analysis. The plantar foot pressure can be employed to detect many kinds of disorders, suggest improvements in treatments, rehabilitation tasks, patient monitoring, development of orthopedic devices, and other applications. In recent years, attention to this topic has grown and is reflected in many works issued in both commercial and academic groups, and has focused on the development of devices for foot plantar pressure measurement with applications in medicine, sports, and research. First works on this subject appeared around 1963 and have continuously evolved with emerging technologies. This paper reviews the reported developments in the field of footwear-embedded sensors for gait measurement, monitoring, diagnosis, and analysis in rehabilitation. Future work is proposed to improve the field of measurement of the footprint with electronic devices.