Intelligent shoe system: A self-powered wearable device for personal localization

Abstract

The traceability of people in movement has always attracted considerable interest in various sectorially-related fields. It has been the subject of numerous studies. In recent years, these studies have focused on the traceability of people's movements through specific network infrastructures, and many applications have been created in this field, often based on centralized web servers. Currently, however, there is no specific literature discussing self-powering architecture that allows real-time identification of people's movements through smart-phones and tablets, nor by means of a device embedded in the heel of a shoe, which includes GPS/GPRS/RFID modules and a piezoelectric self-powering transducer. To cope this problem, in this paper, a wearable system for personal localization with an embedded piezoelectric energy scavenging subsystem is proposed.