Mea­sur­ing real time foot pres­sure and assess­ing body upper body posi­tion­ing is made pos­si­ble by these smart instep soles devel­oped by Khalil Ben Man­sour, a research engi­neer post­ed at the UTC-BMBI (bio-mechan­i­cal and bio-engi­neer­ing) Lab­o­ra­to­ry with his team of students. 

Both light and sup­ple, these ‘smart’ soles can adapt to all sorts of con­di­tion. “In order to under­take field stud­ies, until present, it took us half a day just to set up the equip­ment, where­as our new instep soles allow to make real-time mea­sure­ments on the spot”, sum­ma­rizes Khalil, our spe­cial­ist in bio­me­chan­ics. The key descrip­tors are ‘effi­cien­cy’ and ‘sim­plic­i­ty’. Five sen­sors inte­grat­ed in both soles pro­vide mea­sure­ments of the foot pres­sure vari­a­tions, left and right. 

Simul­ta­ne­ous­ly an iner­tial sen­sor worn round the athlete’s waist analy­ses the upper body and limb posi­tion. The bat­tery and asso­ciate wiring allow full, free move­ment. A Blue­tooth® device for­wards the data direct­ly to a smart­phone or to a com­put­er. The sys­tem is designed to be intu­itive, as the pres­sure exert­ed on each sen­sor in a colour scale. Anoth­er screen dis­plays body atti­tude via a mock-up body. 

Analysing and assessing ‘live’ movements

After a year’s work with under­grad­u­ates in the UTC-BMBI major, the sys­tem has now become oper­a­tional. “Inte­grat­ing the sen­sors in the instep soles and set­ting up the Blue­tooth® link absorbed most of our time and ener­gy”, recalls the project man­ag­er. There are, indeed, numer­ous appli­ca­tions for the new tool, whether it be on indus­tri­al, med­ical or sports lev­els. The inex­pen­sive price-tag for the smart soles – approx. 50 € a pair – should prove attrac­tive to a wide pub­lic of customers. 

“We are cur­rent­ly work­ing with a logis­tics com­pa­ny that wish­es to analy­ses move­ments and body atti­tudes of per­son­nel post­ed to an order-prepa­ra­tion con­vey­or belt, with the aim to reduce injuries and to assess ener­gy deploy­ment”, explains Khalil Ben Man­sour. The sys­tem will also prove of inter­est to chi­ropodists to help them make more pre­cise orthopaedic insteps. Ath­lete train­ing ses­sions can also be envis­aged with improved gestures. 

A final­ized pro­to­type will be read­ied ear­ly 2018. Inter alia, an improved design with the pos­si­bil­i­ty to for­ward data to a cloud archival stor­age will be proposed.