A real-time intelligent shoe-keyboard for computer input

The internet and computer are more popular in the world, and the keyboard is the important input for the computer. However, in our society, many disable people cannot type by using keyboard. In order to assist them, we developed a shoe platform which senses the foot motion and use it as the input for the computer. In this system, we used force sensing resistors (FSRs) and a 3-axis accelerometer to detect foot movements. Based on these sensors, we analyzed human foot motions in different positions, and selected those with more comfortable motions when people sitting in front of the computer with a healthy attitude. To reduce the computational cost and power consumption, and enhance the real-time performance, we use the principle component analysis (PCA) for sensor reduction. Through PCA, we selected some important FSRs in this system. Also we compared two classification methods, chose two layer back propagation(BP) networks, to detect the foot movements for typing.