Real time plantar pressure provides information critical to the understanding of gait mechanics and has a wide range of applications. In this study, smart insoles were designed and developed to measure real time foot plantar pressure. Key features of the insoles included cost-effectiveness, good working pressure detection range, wireless data transfer and real-time data analysis. Calibration of the sensing material was done and the resulting accuracy of the insoles was compared to that of a Kistler force plate, achieving an r 2 value of 0.981. Real-time visualization of pressure mapping was incorporated to enable intuitive understanding of relative plantar pressure distribution.

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For fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, countries used control measures of different severity, from “relaxed” to lockdown. Drastic lockdown measures are considered more effective but also have a negative impact on the economy. When comparing the financial value of lost lives to the losses of an economic disaster, the better option seems to be lockdown measures. We developed a new parameter, the effectiveness of control measures, calculated from the 2nd time derivative of daily case data, for 92 countries, states and provinces. We compared this parameter, and also the mortality during and after the effective phase, for countries with and without lockdowns measures by means of the Mann–Whitney test. We did not find any statistically significant difference in the effectiveness between countries with and without lockdowns (p > 0.76). There was also no significant difference in mortality during the effective phase (p > 0.1); however, a significant difference after the effective phase, with higher mortality for lockdown countries, was identified. The effectiveness correlated well with a parameter derived from the reproductive number (R2 = 0.9480). The average duration of the effective phase was 17.3 ± 10.5 days. The results indicated that lockdown measures are not necessarily superior to relaxed measures, which in turn are not necessarily a recipe for failure. Relaxed measures are, however, more economy-friendly.