The development of a multi-insole shoe for occupations requiring prolonged standing

Abstract

In the first study, we found that treating the entire foot as a rigid body (Figure 1B–D) tends to overestimate ankle power. For instance, traditional ankle power (which assumes a rigid foot, Figure 1B) was 77% higher than a power estimate that only assumes the calcaneus is rigid (Figure 1E) during barefoot walking and 20% higher during shod walking (Figure 2). These case study findings are corroborated by multi-subject studies using multi-segment foot models, which reported that traditional methods overestimated peak ankle power by 27–74%. In the second study, results indicated that modeling the entire foot as rigid can skew comparisons between prosthetic feet. For instance, when comparing two different prosthetic feet, using the conventional ankle power estimate (Figure 1B) resulted in the first prosthesis having peak power 42W higher than the second. However, when applying a more complete anklefoot estimate (Figure 1F), we observed the opposite trend: the second prosthesis had peak power 56W higher than the first.