Smart wearable insoles in industrial environments: A systematic review

Background and Purpose: Industrial environments present unique challenges in ensuring worker safety and optimizing productivity. The emergence of smart wearable technologies such as smart insoles has provided new opportunities to address these challenges through accurate unobtrusive monitoring and analysis of workers' activities and physical parameters. This systematic review aims to analyze the utilization of smart wearable insoles in industrial environments, focusing on their applications, employed analysis methods, and potential future directions. Methods: A comprehensive review was conducted, involving the analysis of 27 papers that utilized smart wearable insoles in industrial settings. The reviewed articles were evaluated to determine the trends in application and methodology, explore the implementation of smart insoles across different industries, and identify the prevalent machine learning models and analyzed activities in the relevant literature. Results: The majority of the reviewed articles (67%) primarily focused on human activity recognition and gesture estimation using smart wearable insoles, aiming to enhance safety and productivity in industrial settings. Furthermore, 10% of the studies focused on fatigue identification, 10% on slip, trip, and fall hazard detection, and 13% on biomechanical analyses of workers' body joint loads. The construction industry accounted for approximately 60% of the studies conducted in industrial settings using smart insoles. The most prevalent machine learning models utilized in these studies were neural networks (48%), support vector machines (33%), knearest neighbors (30%), decision trees (26%), and random forests (15%). These models achieved median accuracies of 95%, 96%, 91%, 92%, and 95%, respectively. Among the analyzed activities, walking, bending with/ without lifting/lowering a load, and carrying a load were the most frequently considered, with frequencies of 10, 10, and 7 out of the 27 studies, respectively. Conclusion: The findings of this systematic review demonstrate the growing interest in implementing smart wearable insoles in industrial environments to enhance safety and productivity. However, the effectiveness of these systems is dependent on factors such as accuracy, reliability, and generalizability of the models. The review highlights the need for further research to address these challenges and to explore the potential of these systems for use in other industrial applications such as manufacturing. Overall, this systematic review provides valuable insights for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers in the field of occupational health and safety.