Measuring the Ground Reaction Force for Walking, Running and Stair Up/Down by Sensorized Insole System

Abstract

The ground reaction force is one of the most important experiments to analyze the gait cycle parameters for treating the patients, diagnosing the diseases, and for general evaluation. The purpose of this research is to study the vertical ground reaction force profile and measure its values for different activities by using a wearable system. Where the system consists of a piezoelectric sensor, band-pass filter circuit, data logger, and power bank. This system is connected to personal computer by WiFi connection through using local router. Also, the system sampling rate is set on 200 Hertz for walking and staircase experiments, and set on 1000 Hertz for running experiments. A healthy body participant has performed the gait cycle experiments like walking at three speeds (1, 1.5, and 2) meter (m)/second (s) and running with three speeds (3, 3.5, and 4) m/s by using a treadmill. While the staircase tests have performed with self-selected walking speed by a stair has a 20 centimeter step-height, 31 centimeter step-width and inclination angle 33.7 degree. The resulted readings are compared to the readings of the previous researches that used a force plate system, and the results indicate high similarity between the VGRF profiles of all activities for both systems. In the end, this system can be used to detect and analyze the gait cycle in different cases. Furthermore, although the advantages of this wearable system, it could be affected by many limitations which should be avoided to make this system feasible in use.