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Shoe-Integrated, Force Sensor Design for Continuous Body Weight Monitoring
Traditional pedobarography methods use direct force sensor placement in the shoe insole to record pressure patterns. One problem with such methods is that they tap only a few points on the flat sole under the foot and, therefore, do not account for the total ground reaction force. As a result, body...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
MDPI
2020
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7348776/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32545528 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s20123339 |
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author | Muzaffar, Shahzad Elfadel, Ibrahim (Abe) M. |
author_facet | Muzaffar, Shahzad Elfadel, Ibrahim (Abe) M. |
author_sort | Muzaffar, Shahzad |
collection | PubMed |
description | Traditional pedobarography methods use direct force sensor placement in the shoe insole to record pressure patterns. One problem with such methods is that they tap only a few points on the flat sole under the foot and, therefore, do not account for the total ground reaction force. As a result, body weight tends to be under-estimated. This disadvantage has made it more difficult for pedobarography to be used to monitor many diseases, especially when their symptoms include body weight changes. In this paper, the problem of pedobarographic body weight measurement is addressed using a novel ergonomic shoe-integrated sensor array architecture based on concentrating the applied force via three-layered structures that we call Sandwiched Sensor Force Consolidators (SSFC). A shoe prototype is designed with the proposed sensors and shown to accurately measure body weight with an achievable relative accuracy greater than 99%, even in the presence of motion. The achieved relative accuracy is at least 4X better than the existing state of the art. The SSFC shoe prototype is built using readily available soccer shoes and piezoresistive FlexiForce sensors. To improve the wearability and comfort of the instrumented shoe, a semi-computational sensor design methodology is developed based on an equivalent-area concept that can accurately account for SSFC’s with arbitrary shapes. The search space of the optimal SSFC design is shown to be combinatorial, and a high-performance computing (HPC) framework based on OpenMP parallel programming is proposed to accelerate the design optimization process. An optimal sensor design speedup of up to 22X is shown to be achievable using the HPC implementation. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7348776 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | MDPI |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-73487762020-07-20 Shoe-Integrated, Force Sensor Design for Continuous Body Weight Monitoring Muzaffar, Shahzad Elfadel, Ibrahim (Abe) M. Sensors (Basel) Article Traditional pedobarography methods use direct force sensor placement in the shoe insole to record pressure patterns. One problem with such methods is that they tap only a few points on the flat sole under the foot and, therefore, do not account for the total ground reaction force. As a result, body weight tends to be under-estimated. This disadvantage has made it more difficult for pedobarography to be used to monitor many diseases, especially when their symptoms include body weight changes. In this paper, the problem of pedobarographic body weight measurement is addressed using a novel ergonomic shoe-integrated sensor array architecture based on concentrating the applied force via three-layered structures that we call Sandwiched Sensor Force Consolidators (SSFC). A shoe prototype is designed with the proposed sensors and shown to accurately measure body weight with an achievable relative accuracy greater than 99%, even in the presence of motion. The achieved relative accuracy is at least 4X better than the existing state of the art. The SSFC shoe prototype is built using readily available soccer shoes and piezoresistive FlexiForce sensors. To improve the wearability and comfort of the instrumented shoe, a semi-computational sensor design methodology is developed based on an equivalent-area concept that can accurately account for SSFC’s with arbitrary shapes. The search space of the optimal SSFC design is shown to be combinatorial, and a high-performance computing (HPC) framework based on OpenMP parallel programming is proposed to accelerate the design optimization process. An optimal sensor design speedup of up to 22X is shown to be achievable using the HPC implementation. MDPI 2020-06-12 /pmc/articles/PMC7348776/ /pubmed/32545528 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s20123339 Text en © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
spellingShingle | Article Muzaffar, Shahzad Elfadel, Ibrahim (Abe) M. Shoe-Integrated, Force Sensor Design for Continuous Body Weight Monitoring |
title | Shoe-Integrated, Force Sensor Design for Continuous Body Weight Monitoring |
title_full | Shoe-Integrated, Force Sensor Design for Continuous Body Weight Monitoring |
title_fullStr | Shoe-Integrated, Force Sensor Design for Continuous Body Weight Monitoring |
title_full_unstemmed | Shoe-Integrated, Force Sensor Design for Continuous Body Weight Monitoring |
title_short | Shoe-Integrated, Force Sensor Design for Continuous Body Weight Monitoring |
title_sort | shoe-integrated, force sensor design for continuous body weight monitoring |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7348776/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32545528 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s20123339 |
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