Design and development of an embedded system for measuring hardness of foot in diabetic patients

In recent times, the occurrence of diabetics has become an increasingly alarming issue. It is also an established fact that diabetics is closely associated with foot related issues, which if not noticed at an early stage may lead to amputation of foot. For early detection it becomes a vital necessity to measure the skin properties such as hardness and foot pressure. But, so far no integrated system has been devised which can measure the hardness of the foot at several points simultaneously and to provide immediate result which is a major bane. This paper aims at designing a module which will measure hardness at several areas of the foot and provides the user with an instantaneous result. This is done by placing the person's foot above the sensing module, the output of which is given to a microcontroller. A predefined database comparison is done and the shore output is made available at the LCD.