**7. Conclusions and Future Work**

This paper has presented a low-cost modular system to measure load on a cane for people with disabilities. The main goal of our work was to design an affordable prototype that could be easily attached to commercial canes and used by a wide population for long-term gait analysis. For this purpose, the system has been shared under an open license. All 3D models, plus the microcontroller software are freely available online under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

The system has been tested in two senior facilities in Cordoba, Andalusia. All volunteers were elderly people that required a cane for everyday mobility and presented different disabilities. As load information is related to user's condition, it has significant clinical value. Load analysis provided by our system may help to monitor the evolution of people after surgery, during rehabilitation or suffering degenerative processes to correct their gait, change treatments or prevent accidents like falls.

Future work will focus on two different aspects: improving the module design and extracting more information from gathered data. The module can be improved by increasing battery life and reducing BT pairing time. We plan to induce a low power consumption stage when no loads are detected for a significant period of time. Additionally, the load on peak estimation will be processed and stored on the microcontroller to reduce communication time between the microcontroller and the mobile phone. Our preliminary tests also point out that further clinically relevant information can be extracted from the system, so we will evaluate parameters of interest in gait analysis and check how many we can extract either from the current module or from an improved version. Finally, we plan to perform exhaustive testing by the target population, including usability tests to assess acceptance.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, J.B.; methodology, A.T. and J.B.; software, J.R.C.-R. and J.B.; hardware, A.T. and J.R.C.-R.; validation, J.B.; investigation, J.B. and C.U.; writing—original draft preparation, J.B.; writing—review and editing, C.U.

**Funding:** This work has been supported by Plan Propio de la Universidad de Malaga (Proyectos Puente) at Malaga University, and the Swedish Knowledge Foundation (KKS) through the research profile Embedded Sensor Systems for Health at Mälardalen University, Sweden.

**Acknowledgments:** Authors would like to acknowledge to the following senior centers in Cordoba (Centros de participacion activa): CORDOBA II (Maria Inmaculada Requena), CORDOBA LOS NARANJOS (Maria Angeles Martin), PONIENTE (Lourdes Requena) and FUENSANTA—CAÑERO (Irene Vidal). We would also like to show our gratitude to Luna Ruiz for her support gathering information from users.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
