An IOT based smart foot sole with embedded fiber optic sensors for healthcare applications

An internet of things (IOT) based smart foot sole, consisting of embedded fiber optic sensors will be developed to help amputees and persons with neurological disorder, help maintain proper gait during walking. This will be a proof of concept for the installation fiber Bragg grating (FBG) type of optical strain sensors in a silicon sole with communication features. This wearable smart sole is proposed to be a healthcare product with remote health monitoring capability through implementation of IOT. Plantar pressure monitoring from the silicone sole will be carried out at high sensitive pressure zones through the FBG sensors. The ground contact forces will be transmitted to the FBG sensors and indicated as a wavelength shift due to strain in the fiber. FBG sensors will be connected to a compact optical spectrum analyzer (OSA) combined with a broadband light source. The sensor data will be stored in a data base for further processing and interpretation of this data into relatable conditions of foot sole contact with the ground. The challenge in this work would be to extract accurate contact information and translate it for actionable response during user locomotion. The data produced from the sensors can be transmitted to a mobile device through WiFi and can be monitored on a custom built android application. This feature helps connect the user and the health personnel to monitor the users activity and take necessary steps to improve the users condition. Key tasks will be to place the sensors in the sole at strategic locations, interpret the sensor data into ground contact conditions, relaying the data to a mobile device using IOT and presenting a visual details of the human gait. An advantage of developing this system is that it can be mounted on existing smart prostheses and integrated with them and also act a wearable mobile sensor platform for patient health monitoring.