Prediction of Plantar Forces During Gait Using Wearable Sensors and Deep Neural Networks^.

To enable on-time and high-fidelity lower-limb exoskeleton control, it is effective to predict the future human motion from the observed status. In this research, we propose a novel method to predict future plantar force during the gait using IMU and plantar sensors. Deep neural networks (DNN) are used to learn the non-linear relationship between the measured sensor data and the future plantar force data. Using the trained network, we can predict the plantar force not only during walking but also at the start and end of walking. In the experiments, the performance of the proposed method is confirmed for different prediction time.