Soft insoles for estimating 3D ground reaction forces using 3D printed foam-like sensors

Sensorized insoles provide a tool for gait studies and health monitoring during daily life. For users to accept such insoles they need to be comfortable and lightweight. Previous work has already demonstrated that estimation of ground reaction forces (GRFs) is possible with insoles. However, these are often assemblies of commercial components restricting design freedom and customization. Within this work, we investigate using four 3D-printed soft foam-like sensors to sensorize an insole. These sensors were combined with system identification of Hammerstein-Wiener models to estimate the 3D GRFs, which were compared to values from an instrumented treadmill as the golden standard. It was observed that the four sensors behaved in line with the expected change in pressure distribution during the gait cycle. In addition, the identified (personalized) Hammerstein-Wiener models showed the best estimation performance (on average RMS error 9.3%, R^2=0.85 and mean absolute error (MAE) 7%) of the vertical, mediolateral, and anteroposterior GRFs. Thereby showing that these sensors can estimate the resulting 3D force reasonably well. These results for nine participants were comparable to or outperformed other works that used commercial FSRs with machine learning. The identified models did decrease in estimation performance over time but stayed on average 11.35% RMS and 8.6% MAE after a week with the Hammerstein-Wiener model seeming consistent between days two and seven. These results show promise for using 3D-printed soft piezoresistive foam-like sensors with system identification to be a viable approach for applications that require softness, lightweight, and customization such as wearable (force) sensors.