FASH: Detecting tiredness of walking people using pressure sensors

Abstract

The number of elders who encounter falling accidents has been increasing in the past few decades. Falling accidents could cause major injuries, such as having bruise, breaking bone, and in the worst case, losing life. Therefore, preventing elders from falling accidents is important in order to ensure the quality of life. In this paper, we propose Fatigue Alerting SHoes (FASH), a pair of shoes which detects the fatigue of walking people. There are three effects of fatigue on gait, and FASH system acquires all of them to improve the accuracy of fatigue detection. FASH system uses pressure sensors embedded in a pair of shoes to detect the tiredness, and notifies the user of "Tiredness Scale," a scale we defined in order to show the degree of tiredness. Through the evaluation, we affirmed the availability of using pressure sensor to detect accumulation of tiredness. We also confirmed the difference between the physical tiredness and the subjective feeling toward tiredness, which signifies the importance of acknowledging the user of his/her fatigue.