A Facile Low-Cost Wireless Self-Powered Footwear System for Monitoring Plantar Pressure

Feet is known as the second heart of human body. People stand, walk and run on their feet anytime and anywhere. These dynamic processes contain a variety of characteristic information and several biomechanical energy transitions. Previous studies have demonstrated the importance of collecting and analyzing pressure from all parts of the plantar foot in clinical medicine, industrial design, biomechanics, as well as in rehabilitation. This paper presents a lightweight self-powered large range plantar distribution mapping system, which uses a piezoresistive sensor with a porous structure and a low-power integrated data acquisition (DAQ) circuit board to process and transmit signals wirelessly to a host computer. With the program developed by LabVIEW software, the system can dynamically monitor the plantar pressure and display the changes of plantar pressure in realtime. More importantly, a triboelectric nanogenerator have been integrated into the insoles to collect the mechanical energy and continuously powers the whole system which provides a solution of sport/exercise biomechanics pressure monitoring.