A Plantar Pressure Detection and Gait Analysis System Based on Flexible Triboelectric Pressure Sensor Array and Deep...

Area of Science:

• Materials Science
• Biomedical Engineering
• Wearable Technology

Background:

• Gait analysis is crucial for health monitoring and disease diagnosis.
• Existing systems are often bulky, restrictive, and require external power.
• There is a need for comfortable, self-powered wearable gait detection solutions.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a soft, breathable, lightweight, and self-powered wearable gait detection system.
• To create a plantar pressure sensor array using flexible triboelectric pressure sensors (FTPS).
• To achieve accurate real-time gait analysis for health applications.

Main Methods:

• Fabrication of a soft, breathable electrospinning nanofiber film with triboelectric properties.
• Integration of 32 FTPS into an intelligent insole for plantar pressure sensing.
• Utilizing a long short-term memory (LSTM) artificial neural network for gait analysis.

Main Results:

• The FTPS demonstrated high sensitivity (45.1 mV/kPa and 19.4 mV/kPa) across different pressure ranges.
• The intelligent insole is soft, breathable, stable, and self-powered.
• The LSTM model achieved a gait judgment accuracy of 94.23%.

Conclusions:

• A feasible solution for real-time gait detection using a self-powered, wearable sensor insole has been developed.
• This technology offers potential for improved human health assessment and early disease diagnosis.
• The system's comfort and ease of use overcome limitations of current gait analysis methods.