Design and implementation of a plantar pressure measurement system

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to design and build a plantar pressure sensing system which consists main ly of a piezoresistive technology based mat. The design is inspired by a pressure sensing matrix model and presents a maximum attainable spatial resolution of 1.7cmx1.4cm. Data is acquired using an NI USB-6002 board. An application is implemented using NI LabVIEW 14.0 in order to process the collected data and visualize the output of the system. This latter includes two types of plantar profile pressure images: A binary-level real time display of the subject’s footprint and a grey-level display of the plantar pressure at each sensing unit of the plat form. This interface can be used by a therapist to extract some spatial parameters and determine gait abnormalities.