Biomechanical gait analysis informs clinical practice and research by linking characteristics of gait with neurological or musculoskeletal injury or disease. However, there are limitations to analyses conducted at gait labs as they require onerous construction of force plates into laboratories mimicking the lived environment, on-site patient assessments, as well as requiring specialist technicians to operate. Digital insoles may offer patient-centric solutions to these challenges. In this work, we demonstrate how a digital insole measuring osteoarthritis-specific gait signatures yields similar results to the clinical gait-lab standard. To achieve this, we constructed a machine learning model, trained on force plate data collected in participants with knee arthropathy and healthy controls. This model was highly predictive of force plate data from a validation set (area under the receiver operating characteristics curve (auROC) = 0.86; area under the precision-recall curve (auPR) = 0.90) and of a separate, independent digital insole dataset containing control and knee osteoarthritis subjects (auROC = 0.83; auPR = 0.86). After showing that digital insole derived gait characteristics are comparable to traditional gait measurements, we next show that a single stride of raw sensor time series data could be accurately assigned to each subject, highlighting that individuals (even healthy) using digital insoles can be identified by their gait characteristics. This work provides a framework for a promising alternative to traditional clinical gait analysis methods, adds to the growing body of knowledge regarding wearable technology analytical pipelines, and supports clinical development of at-home gait assessments, with the potential to improve the ease, frequency, and depth of patient monitoring.
