I have been developing applications for Pressure-sensing floor mat for the past few years. When comparing to typical motion capture devices, floor mat proved it is irreplaceable on the tasks such as monitoring weight shifting and muscle movement. One piece of the floor mat is only about 2 sqft. People may not be able to make a lot of motions other than standing. However, the floor mats can be connected together forming into a larger mat. We had tried successfully to make 12×2 and 3×2 floor sensor matrices. People can walk on the trail while the pressure of their feet will be captured and shown as a heatmap in real-time.
But after a few months, we may not need a large matrix of floor mats to capture pressure data of a walking or running subject. We are going to convert floor mats into shoe inserts. And the current cable connection will finally be replaced by a wireless connection such as Bluetooth or wifi. In this way, we no longer need to cover the whole floor with the floor mats to do gait analysis related research, just put a pressure-sensing shoe insert into each shoe of the subject. If the pressure sensing shoe inserts are really implemented, I believe the capabilities of the applications will definitely be extended a lot. Sports professionals can use it for analyzing motions and improve their performance. Physical Therapists can use it to collect their patients’ real-time gait data. We even can use it to verify identification based on gait recognition.
FYI: There are more than 2 shoe inserts on the fitness market. Even Socks that do the same work.
Thank you for the information. We will try out different products and see which ones fit our requirement. Our work is more of introducing new approaches and methods even if they are in similar physical shapes with existing products. And when talking about similar products, I believe there must have been more than 10 floor pressure-sensing plates/mats on the market before the floor mat we use released to the market. A lot of technologies can do the same work, but they usually have different levels of performance, different focuses, disadvantages, and advantages. Otherwise, we probably just need one product on the market, and one method to explore the world.
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