A. Pedro Souto

A new approach to implement a customized anatomic insole in orthopaedic footwear of lower limb orthosis

This work is supported by FEDER funding on the COMPETE program and by national funds through FCT-Foundation for Science and Technology within the scope of the project POCI-01-0145-FEDER- 007136 and UID/CTM/00264.

Double dielectric barrier (DBD) plasma-assisted deposition of chemical stabilized nanoparticles on polyamide 6,6 and polyester fabrics

The development of new multifunctional textiles containing nanoparticles (NPs) has a special interest in several applications for pharmaceutical and medical products. Cu, Zn and Ag are the most promising antimicrobial NPs, exhibiting strong antibacterial activities. However, most of antimicrobial textiles coated with NPs are not able to perform a controlled release of NPs because of the high degree of aggregation. The aim of this study is to assess the effect of NPs stabilizers such as citrate, alginate and polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) in Cu, Zn and Ag NPs dispersions. The obtained dispersions were used to develop a new class of antibacterial NPs coatings onto polyamide 6,6 (PA66) and polyester fabrics (PES) by Double Dielectric Barrier (DBD) plasma discharge. Dynamic light scattering (DLS) was used to evaluate the best dispersing agent in terms of size, polydispersity index and zeta potential. Coating efficiency was evaluated by SEM, XPS and FTIR. The washing fastness of the coatings developed was also tested. The results show that the best dispersions were obtained using 2.5% of citrate for ZnO, 5% Alginate for Cu and 2.5% alginate for Ag NPs. SEM, XPS and FTIR analysis shows that DBD is an efficient deposition technique only for Ag and Cu NPs and that better perform in PA66 than PES fabric. The DBD deposition in air display similar results in term of NPS deposition of usually more efficient plasma jets using carrier gas such as N2 and Ar.

Synthesis and Characterization of Poly (N-Isopropylacrylamide) Zno Nanocomposites for Textile Applications

Department of Science and Technology (DST), India and Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia (FCT), Portugal .

Human Gait Analyses Using Multibody Systems Formulation: Normal and Pathological Scenarios

The main goal of this work is to present planar biomechanical multibody model, suitable to be used in inverse dynamic analyses. The proposed approach is straightforward and computationally efficient for the study of different human gait scenarios e.g. normal and pathological. For this, a biomechanical model of the lower limb of the human body was considered. The model consists of three rigid bodies (thigh, calf and foot), corresponding to relevant anatomical segments of lower limb. The three bodies are connected by revolute joints and described by eight natural coordinates, which are the Cartesian coordinates of the basic points located at the joints (hip, knee, ankle, metatarsal-phalangeal). The anthropometric dimensions of the model correspond to those of a normal male of 1.77 m and 80.0 kg and a poliomyelitis (polio) patient of 1.78 m and 92 kg. The total biomechanical system encompasses 5 degrees-of-freedom: 2 degrees-of-freedom for hip trajectory, 1 degree-of-freedom for hip flexion-extension motion, 1 degree-of-freedom for knee flexion-extension and 1 degree-of-freedom for ankle plantarflexion-dorsiflexion. The developed model was applied to solve an inverse dynamics problem of human motion. Therefore, the main objective of this study is to determine the joint kinematics, moments-of-force and reaction forces during an entire gait cycle.