Detecting Feet's Bending Patterns With Smart Insoles

Foot bending is a basic component of walking. Although bending is important for foot-ground interaction and ensures the speed and balance of the whole walking cycle, there is still no practical method for recording and analyzing foot bending under everyday scenarios. In this study we propose to use a smart insole, with two embedded Inertial Measurement Units, to acquire the movements of the fore-foot and the hind-foot and deduce the bending, represented by the bending point's position. We use the deep learning approach to estimate the bending position and its changes during different walking patterns. On the dataset containing 8 test subjects and 6 walking patterns, our method can achieve an overall mean absolute error accuracy of 2.58 cm. The smart insole can be with the subject all the day, bring in a new method for continuous foot bending monitoring.