Effect of pressure insole sampling frequency on peak force accuracy during running

Pressure sensing insoles enable us to estimate forces under the feet during activities such as running, which can provide valuable insight into human movement. Pressure insoles also afford the opportunity to collect more data in more representative environments than can be achieved in laboratory studies. One key challenge with real-world use of pressure insoles is limited battery life which restricts the amount of data that can be collected on a single charge. Reducing sampling frequency is one way to prolong battery life, at the cost of decreased measurement accuracy, but this trade-off has not been quantified, which hinders decision-making by researchers and developers. Therefore, we characterized the effect of decreasing sampling frequency on peak force estimates from pressure insoles (Novel Pedar, 100 Hz) across a range of running speeds and slopes. Data were downsampled to 50, 33, 25, 20, 16 and 10 Hz. Force peaks were extracted due to their importance in biomechanical algorithms trained to estimate musculoskeletal forces and were compared with the reference sampling frequency of 100 Hz to compute relative errors. Peak force errors increased exponentially from 0.7% (50 Hz) to 9% (10 Hz). However, peak force errors were <3% for all sampling frequencies down to 20 Hz. For some pressure insoles, sampling rate is inversely proportional to battery life. Therefore, these findings suggest that battery life could be increased up to 5x at the expense of 3% errors. These results are encouraging for researchers aiming to deploy pressure insoles for remote monitoring or in longitudinal studies.