Design of an instrumented shoe to measure the force exerted by the feet during walking

Abstract

Podiatrists belonging to the Hospital of Vic need a rehabilitation device which measures the weight that a patient puts on his feet while undergoing rehabilitation. During rehabilitation, the podiatrist asks the patient to exert a certain percentage of his weight on his foot while he supports himself with a crutch. This percentage of weight will vary during the course of rehabilitation. The aim of this project is to develop a compact, cost effective, state of the art, dynamic weight measuring instrument for the Podiatrists to check if a patient puts the desired amount of weight on a broken leg during rehabilitation. The equipment currently available in the market is expensive, static and bulky. The approach followed to accomplish the target is by the use of sensors, microcontrollers, and display units for processing information and displaying the results. A buzzer is used as an alarm when weight is out of the safe range prescribed by the doctors. Possible outcomes besides dynamic weight measurement include posture correction, quantitative analysis of rehabilitation, ability to provide timeframe of recovery and ability to find the effectiveness of the treatment adopted by the podiatrist. In this project, I have worked on the mechanical and electronic design of the instrumented shoe which includes conceptual design in pro Engineer wildfire 5.0, material selection for various sole layers, sensor selection, microcontroller programming and simulation in Proteus software. The project involved signing of a confidentiality agreement for granting funds to make a prototype shoe, which would restrict or delay my presenting the project or divulge information to SASTRA University. Due to this reason, the prototype was not made despite the hospital and the lab being interested in the design.