Pressure sensing insoles for learning Tai-Chi Chuan

Abstract

In this work, we designed and implemented a pair of pressure sensing insoles to quantize the user's plantar pressure distributions. Each pressure sensing insole includes four force sensor modules, a microcontroller and a wireless data transmission module. We firstly performed a simple process to calibrate the force sensor, and then built a plantar pressure model for estimating the complete plantar pressure distribution. We have applied the pressure sensing insoles to develop a Tai-Chi Chuan instruction system which, with visual feedback, can help users to learn the correct plantar pressure distribution of the fundamental movements of Tai-Chi Chuan. We have also evaluated the efficiency of learning Tai-Chi Chuan with our system. According to our experimental results, users using our system can learn faster than those without using our system.