Gait Analysis Insole

Smart Insole is a wearable safety tool designed to spot dangerous walking surfaces before injuries occur. Instead of depending solely on safety staff to monitor large worksites, this system uses workers’ natural walking patterns to detect slip and trip risks automatically. By analyzing how gait changes on unsafe flooring, the device identifies hazardous areas with machine-learning intelligence and distinguishes unsafe surfaces with over 98% accuracy. This approach turns every worker into a real-time safety sensor, helping prevent falls and reduce costs related to workplace injuries.

Project Description

Falls are leading causes of nonfatal injuries in workplaces which lead to substantial injury and economic consequences. To help avoid fall injuries, safety managers usually need to inspect working areas routinely. However, it is difficult for a limited number of safety managers to inspect fall hazards instantly especially in large workplaces. To address this problem, a novel fall hazard identification method is proposed in this paper which makes it possible for all workers to report the potential hazards automatically. This method is based on the fact that people use different gaits to get across different floor surfaces. Through analyzing gait patterns, potential fall hazards could be identified automatically. In this research, Smart Insole, an insole shaped wearable system for gait analysis, was applied to measure gait patterns for fall hazard identification. Slips and trips are the focus of this study since they are two main causes of falls in workplaces. Five effective gait features were extracted to train a Support Vector Machine (SVM) model for recognizing slip hazard, trip hazard, and safe floor surfaces. Experiment results showed that fall hazards could be recognized with high accuracy (98.1%).

System Overiew
insole_top
Publication
Ubiquitous Fall Hazard Identification With Smart Insole
Diliang Chen, Golnoush Asaeikheybari, Huan Chen, Wenyao Xu, Ming-Chun Huang

IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, Vol. 25, No. 7, July 2021

PDF | DOI

Smart Insole-based Indoor Localization System for Internet of Things Applications
Diliang Chen, Huiyi Cao, Huan Chen, Zetao Zhu, Xiaoye Qian, Wenyao Xu, Ming-Chun Huang
IEEE Internet of Things Journal, Vol. 6, Issue 4, Pages 7253-7265

PDF | DOI

The Smart Insole: A Pilot Study of Fall Detection
Xiaoye Qian, Haoyou Cheng, Diliang Chen, Quan Liu, Huan Chen, Haotian Jiang, Ming-Chun Huang
EAI international conference on body area networks,  Pages 37-49

PDF | DOI

mHealth Technologies Toward Active Health Information Collection and Tracking in Daily Life: A Dynamic Gait Monitoring Example
Yi Cai, Xiaoye Qian, Huiyi Cao, Jianian Zheng, Wenyao Xu, Ming-Chun Huang
IEEE Internet of Things Journal (IOTJ), Volume 9, Number 16, Pages 15077-15088, August 2022

DOI

PI Leads
MCH

Prof. Ming-Chun Huang

Associate Professor, Duke Kunshan University

Contributors
Xu

Prof. Wenyao Xu

Professor, University at Buffalo

Diliang

Prof. Diliang Chen

Assistant Professor, University of New Hampshire

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