iMagiMat Smart Carpet: POF Layer to Detect Gait and Mobility.

The iMagiMat Smart Carpet is a tomography-based polymer optical fibre (POF) sensor system that images the real-time deformation exerted by human footsteps, to access characteristics of individual gait and mobility. Measurements of changes in POF transmission, due to small deformations of individual optical fibres embedded within the carpet surface, are mapped using a sensing grid of Toray POF sensor elements of 1mm diameter (multimode, 980μm inner diameter, 10μm cladding) and fed into an inverse tomography imaging problem solver. We report recent progress; including the implementation of fast footprint "centre of mass" calculation, related to "centre of pressure" and ground reaction force, the suitability of machine learning techniques for the extraction of gait parameters; and evaluation of iMagiMat performance against more conventional technology such as GAITrite, force plates and inertial motion sensors.