Instrumented shoes for pathological gait assessment

After analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of each existing system, we propose a homemade shoe with an “instrumented sole”. This sole contains several holes designed to receive force transducers. Each homemade transducer is composed of one dynamometric ring and one strain gauge. When defined forces are exerted on each transducer separately, the responses are very linear and the absolute error is less than 2%. This instrumented shoe is a robust tool to assess the instantaneous vertical forces and plantar pressures exerted during gait over a great number of steps.