Smart Foot Wearables: An Interdisciplinary Perspective.

Abstract

Smart foot wearables (SFWs) are emerging components of Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) ecosystems and wearable cyber-physical platforms. They support mobility assessment, rehabilitation monitoring, foot-health management, fall-risk assessment, sports biomechanics, navigation, and biometric authentication. Unlike stationary instrumentation, SFWs face coupled constraints in power, form factor, near-ground wireless connectivity, and long-term mechanical and thermal loading. This survey presents a cross-layer synthesis of SFW systems. The proposed taxonomy defines five primary classification axes: form factor and fixation regime; sensing stack and plantar semantics; sampling, timing, and bilateral alignment; computation and communication partition; and validation and transfer setting. It further identifies three cross-cutting deployment modifiers: sensor-stack mechanics and drift sources; energy, charging, and maintenance regime; and feedback and closed-loop safety. The survey analyzes sensing modalities, communication constraints, and data-processing pipelines, with particular attention to drift, timing integrity, multimodal fusion, and transfer across footwear and terrain. It also examines clinical-data interoperability, privacy and security, charging and calibration burden, washability, durability, and other barriers to sustained deployment. Literature was identified through Google Scholar, six bibliographic databases, citation tracking, and targeted supplementation. The search channels, search period, shared concept blocks, and ScienceDirect adaptation are reported in the methodology. Across the heterogeneous evidence reviewed, the synthesis suggests that real-world validity depends less on isolated sensor accuracy than on interactions among calibration stability, timing integrity, wireless delivery, energy autonomy, validation design, and maintenance. The survey concludes with reporting and research priorities for robust, clinically relevant, and maintainable SFW systems.