A Novel Sensorized Skin Insole for Sensing Feet Pressure Distributions

The paper presents a novel sensorized skin insole based on tactile capacitive technology. The insole prototype provides information such as pressure distribution, contact force and moments, center of pressure. These variables require an accurate calibration procedure to retrieve the relationship between the measured capacitance and the corresponding applied pressure. A calibration technique is here proposed and validated by exploiting a pair of shoes equipped with force/torque sensors. The validation analysis shows that the quantities estimated by the skin insoles match data measured by the force/torque sensors. Further, an example of real application for using skin insoles is presented for a gait analysis.