M.M.H. Fayed

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Master thesis (1)

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The smart safety Shoe

A new type of safety shoe that helps prevent lower back problems and opens the door to a new era of preventive safety footwear

Master thesis (2023) - M.M.H. Fayed , W.F. van der Vegte , L. Goto

The smart safety shoe is a concept safety shoe that has been in development as a collaboration between Allshoes safety footwear and TU Delft since 2020. Previous work on the shoe consisted of 2 graduation projects and a student course which resulted in the current concept of an injury preventing safety shoe focused on preventing lower back pain in the logistics sector. The shoe works by using pressure sensors and machine learning to detect unhealthy postures while its wearer has to lift various objects as part of their job (manual handling).
This project focused on further developing the concept of the smart safety shoe and evaluating the prototypes from the last two projects. Previous projects provided two different pressure sensor layouts which are evaluated using a high-end pressure sensing insole.
A manual handling experiment was set up and performed on 16 different participants from a lab and a warehouse. During testing participants were instructed to perform manual handling while holding 5 different postures. It was possible to train a machine learning model using the various pressure profiles gathered from the experiment. Using this model, the two sensor layouts from the previous projects were evaluated for their ability to detect the 5 predetermined postures. It was found that the latest layout outperformed the previous one and was therefore selected for further development of the smart safety shoe.
The integration of various other sensors and actuators was evaluated, and the core functions of the shoe were defined with an indication towards future improvements of the smart safety shoe.
The shoe has now been publicly presented by Allshoes and the goal is to have the product on the market by the end of 2025. In order for this to happen further prototyping is needed to create an improved machine learning model based on the selected sensor layout. The shoe shows promising responses from current safety shoe clients. When finally launched it will be part of a new type of protective equipment focused on prevention.