FootNote: designing a cost effective plantar pressure monitoring system for diabetic foot ulcer prevention

Diabetic Food Ulcer (DFU) is one of the dangerous complications of Diabetes Mellitus that is notoriously progressive and high in recurrence. Peripheral neuropathy, or damage to nerves in the foot, is the culprit that leads to DFU. Many research and commercial development has attempted to mitigate the condition by establishing an artificial feedback through in-shoe pressure-sensing solutions for patients. However these solutions suffer from inherent issues of analog sensors, prohibitive price tags and inflexibility in the choice of footwear. We approached these problems by designing a prototype with fabric digital sensors. The data showed promising potential for assertion frequency tracking and user activity recognition. Although the bigger challenge lies ahead -- to correlate approximation by digital sensors to analog pressure reading, we have demonstrated that an inexpensive, more versatile and flexible solution based from digital sensors for DFU prevention is indeed feasible.