Wearable sensor enables continuous and ubiquitous real-time monitoring of the gait pattern of a patient and it eliminates the need of frequent visit to the clinics and the use of costly medical facilities. Attaching gait sensors on body, however, may not be easy as most of the reported gait sensors are made of non-stretchable materials and they are non-conformal to human skin. In this paper, we have presented an in-shoe pressure measurement system that is developed using multiple stretchable microfluidic sensors for monitoring gait parameters ergonomically. The sensor here has employed Eutectic Gallium-Indium (EGaIn) as the conductive liquid to fill up a spiral-patterned microchannel which is encapsulated inside an Ecoflex 00-50 elastomer. Fundamental studies have been performed to investigate the sensor's behaviours when it is exposed to normal and axial applied forces. As proof-of-concept demonstration of the applicability of the proposed sensor for gait monitoring application, we have measured the localised foot pressure and dynamically by attaching two sensors on a shoe insole for detecting pressure changes around the heel and metatarsal regions. The experiment was then extended to evaluate the strain sensing by measuring the ankle angle. It has been shown that data can be captured wirelessly and displayed on a smartphone using the Bluetooth communication protocol. Owing to its unique and stretchable structure, the sensor is able to distinguish walking and running motions by analysing their stance and swing phases. This work has explored the possibility of applying a microfluidic-based structure for designing a wearable gait sensor that has good flexibility.

The power consumption of a microprocessor is a huge channel for information leakage. While the most popular exploitation of this channel is to recover cryptographic keys from embedded devices, other applications such as mobile app fingerprinting, reverse engineering of firmware, and password recovery are growing threats. Countermeasures proposed so far are tuned to specific applications, such as crypto-implementations. They are not scalable to the large number and variety of applications that typically run on a general purpose microprocessor.In this paper, we investigate the design of a microprocessor, called PARAM with increased resistance to power based sidechannel attacks. To design PARAM, we start with identifying the most leaking modules in an open-source RISC V processor. We evaluate the leakage in these modules and then add suitable countermeasures. The countermeasures depend on the cause of leakage in each module and can vary from simple modifications of the HDL code ensuring secure translation by the EDA tools, to obfuscating data and address lines thus breaking correlation with the processor's power consumption. The resultant processor is instantiated on the SASEBO-GIII FPGA board and found to resist Differential Power Analysis even after one million power traces. Compared to contemporary countermeasures for power side-channel attacks, overheads in area and frequency are minimal.

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