2016 IEEE 5th Global Conference on Consumer Electronics

Development of a Wearable Tele-monitoring System

with IoT for Bio-medical Applications
A.H.T.E. De Silva1, 6, W.H.P. Sampath2, 6, N.H.L. Sameera3, 6, Y.W.R. Amarasinghe4, 6, A. Mitani5, 7
6
Department of Mechanical Engineering, 7Department of Design
6
University of Moratuwa, Katubedda, Sri Lanka
7
Sapporo City University, Hokkaido, Japan
1
ahteranga@gmail.com, 2sampathwhp@gmail.com, 3nupehewagels@gmail.com, 4ranama@mech.mrt.ac.lk, 5a.mitani@scu.ac.jp

Abstract—The system was developed for remote care-taking
applications which could be incorporated for patients. This system
has utilised as a sensor integrated shoe and a waist belt. The foot
pressures of the foot sole vital points are being measured along
with the additional contribution from inertial measurement units.
The measured data is being transmitted to a remote Internet of
Thing (IOT) for further analysis and stored data in the (IOT)
cloud would be available for future medical researchers. The
system furthermore comprises activity and location tracking and
fall detection system. Concerning the caretaker's convenience, an
Android application has also developed.
main controller, activity tracker, location tracker, fall detector
and data transmitter to the tele-monitoring platforms (Fig. 1).
A. Tactile Sensor Integrated Shoe and Waist Belt
Designed each shoe has a 3D printed insole (Fig. 2) which is
embedded with an array of five FlexiForce piezo-resistive
sensors aligned to five major foot anatomical areas based on
iWalk [3] and Z. Pataky et al. [4].

Keywords—Tele-monitoring; Location Tracking; Activity

Tracking; Internet of Things; Sensor Integrated Shoe; Plantar
Pressure Measuring;

I. INTRODUCTION
Concerning on the requirements of the modern medical
industry, this approach of particular interest in the search for
reliable information on the evolution of different diseases such
as Parkinson's disease, heart disease and diabetes that affect a
large percentage of the population.
Fig. 2. Sensor integrated shoe
Implementing real time tele-caring systems on those patients
and elderly persons would be very useful to identify their Intermediate convex curved inserts made out of Silicon
conditions. Plantar pressure data have been recognized very Rubber, inserted between FlexiForce force sensor and feet to
important in the assessing such patients and information derived diminish the applied load. FlexiForce readings were mapped to
from plantar pressure also can assist in determining the force applied on it by using dead-weight test while a numerical
impairments in neurological disorders. Prior researches has simulation using COMSOL Multiphysics 5.2 (Fig. 3) used to
utilised the IOT based Tele-monitoring for patients [1], [2]. This convert applied force to force on FlexiForce sensor according to
novel system implementation has addressed the gap of remotely results shown in Fig. 4.
analysing/logging plantar pressure data of patients, along with
other clinically important data in real time.

II. WORKING PRINCIPLE OF PROPOSED SYSTEM

Wearable device comprises a sensor integrated shoe and a
waist belt. Shoe is designed to obtain force readings of each feet
and transmit to the waist belt. While waist belt designed as the

Fig. 3. Convex curved inserts (a) Positioning inserts (b) Load applied area
(c) Roller constraint area (d) Integral pressure probe area (e) The
Fig. 1. Schematic diagram of overall system deformation of the hemisphere under loading

978-1-5090-2333-2/16/$31.00 ©2016 IEEE


Fig. 4. Mapping sensor values(a) Calibration curve of FlexiForce A301
sensor (b) Force on FlexiForce sensor surface vs force applied on insert
Experimental setup has been used to measure the overall
displacement of the sensor integrated shoe and it’s measured as
4mm. Prior the shoe insole layer fabrication, the shoe insole was
modelled and simulated in COMSOL Multiphysics 5.2 by
utilising finite element tools (Fig. 5) while measured deflection
used as an input parameter to the simulation. Custom designed
snob enclosure used to facilitate 3D printed layers, to reduce the
slip of the sole when walking.
2016 IEEE 5th Global Conference on Consumer Electronics
Fig. 6. Tele-monitoring interfaces (a). The live dashboard of the IOT
(b). mobile interface
traversed 14 times. Equation (1) could be used to derived
walking speed of the patient by using heel pressure values
extracted from planter pressure data. Where stride length for a
male person is taken as 0.415 times Height. The average walking
speed was derived as 0.44ms-1 using (1) where the actual
walking speed is 0.62ms-1.
B. Activity Tracking, Fall Detection and Localising
Jay Chen et al ’s method [5] of fall detection by means of an
accelerometer is used for fall detection while basic postures are
derived using both foot pressures and accelerometer data. Gait
parameters such as number of strides would be counted based on
the number of peaks of heel pressure sensor values.
Localisation of the patient is being done by GPS signals from
Ublox NEO-6 GPS Module located in the waist belt at 1Hz
sampling frequency combined with GSM signal triangulation
for reliable operations. Due to the fact of 10Hz data acquisition
frequency from each plantar force measuring sensors, the
acquired data is being concatenated throughout 15 seconds as a
string, then being uploaded as a lesser length encrypted string.
The IOT itself does the received data decryption and further
analysis.
C. Telecaring Platform
The PC interface of the system and the Android application
shown in Fig. 6 was implemented to meet the needs of remote
tele-caring using ThingSpeak IOT provided by MathWorks Inc..
III. RESULTS
A. Calculating Number of Steps and Walking Speed Using
Walking Paterns
A walking experiment was conducted along a 35 feet long
hallway by a subject of 5 feet tall male. The whole hallway was
Fig. 5. Positioning force sensors (a) Pressure points used by iWalk [3]. (b)
Adopted vital pressure points in foot. (c) Pressure points on insole (d) Shoe
insole design validation
 Walking Speed Cadence u Stride Length60 
B. Localisation and Fall Detection
The experiments were done within 20m radius from N6.7959
and E79.8989. The location is being identified and displayed as
N6.7957 and E79.8993. The fall detection experiment was done
using be a punch bag of weight 52kg (reasonably assumed to a
human subject) and observed the alerting system.
IV. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORKS
This foot pressure intensity measuring approach has been
implemented by tactile sensors combining with inertial
measurement units to identify human postures, localising and
detect falls in real time. By incorporating a mathematical
modelling and/or artificial intelligence technique along with a
thorough clinical testing this system would be capable of
detecting diabetic foot ulcer aggravations by foot pressure
intensities, monitor both Parkinson patients and recovery of
neuropaths remotely with the IOT technology based on gait
abnormalities.
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[Accessed: 11- Aug- 2016].
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