Capacitive Pressure Sensitive Smart Shoe Insole for Gait Improvement of Cerebral Palsy Patients

Gait analysis is one of the decision-making factors for treating children with Cerebral Palsy (CP) disease. CP is a group of congenital disorders due to abnormal brain development at the fetal stage, affecting motor functions and movement. About 1,000 children are born with CP each year, and 1,500 children are diagnosed with CP between 4 to 12 years of age. A crucial point is improving the posture through gait analysis using smart insole systems. Here, an insole is designed with capacitive pressure sensors using black carbon in a disposable, non-rechargeable, alkaline 9 V battery. These sensors possess mark-able characteristics of achieving 99% linearity between weight and output capacitance value of the sensor, minimum hysteresis loss of 2 %, negligible time for the response of <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$110 \mu$</tex> s to attain 90 % output value from 10 %, and <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$161 \mu ~\mathrm{s}$</tex> to recover back 10 % when the input is removed. The virtual reality effect is presented with a Graphical User Interface of Python with real-time insole system values and color according to <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\mathbf{4}$</tex> different pressure values. Overall, it will help to improve the biomechanics of CP patients through gait analysis of different phases.