  Various foot complications can be easily avoided by continuous monitoring of
foot plantar temperature and pressure. In this work, the design,
characterization, and implementation of a Fiber Bragg Gratings (FBG) based
smart insole capable of simultaneously measuring plantar pressure and
temperature has been reported. The instrumented insole was tested and verified
during static and gait exercises. The paper also provides a comparison of the
developed optoelectronic-based solution with a commercially available and
widely used plantar pressure measurement and analysis system and a lab-made,
electronic sensor-based smart insole that can measure both plantar temperature
and pressure. It was shown that even though the commercially available
expensive system is very robust and highly precise due to many sensing units on
the insole, the developed insole with a smaller number of sensors can provide
both plantar temperature and pressure with reasonable precision while
displaying both foot pressure and temperature maps, and gait cycle plots in
real-time. The FBG-based solution is comfortable and safer than the other
systems being compared. Thus, confirming the effectiveness of the proposed
solution as an addition to the research area for detecting foot complications
non-invasively using foot insoles.
