title: Design and test of a soft plantar force measurement system for gait detection.
abstract: This work describes a plantar force measurement system. The MEMS pressure sensor, as the key sensing element, is designed, fabricated and embedded into a flexible silicon oil-filled bladder made of silicon rubber to constitute a single sensing unit. A conditioning circuit is designed for signal processing and data acquisition. The characteristics of the plantar force sensing unit are investigated by both static and dynamic tests. A comparison of characteristics between the proposed plantar force sensing unit and a commercial flexible force sensor is presented. A practical experiment of plantar force measurement has been carried out to validate the system. The results demonstrate that the proposed measurement system has a potential for success in the application of plantar force measurement during normal gait.
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory for Manufacturing Systems Engineering, Xi'an Jiaotong University, No. 28, Xianning West Road, Xi'an, Shaanxi 710049, China. bssair@163.com
authors.forename: Xuefeng
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Yulong
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Zhao
authors.forename: Zhengyong
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Duan
authors.forename: Yan
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Liu
mesh_terms: D001696:Biomechanical Phenomena; D015374:Biosensing Techniques; D005684:Gait / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D055617:Micro-Electrical-Mechanical Systems / Q000295:instrumentation*; D011312:Pressure; D012825:Silicon / Q000737:chemistry
chemical_list: D012825:Silicon