Using a texture analyser to objectively quantify foot orthoses.

Background And Aim: Foot orthoses alter the kinematics and kinetics in gait. With the increasing importance of evidence based practice and with the permanent development of subtractive manufacturing and introduction of additive manufacturing, there is a growing need for quantification of orthoses parameters. We describe a measurement method and protocol to quantify different parameters of a foot orthosis.

Assessment of transfemoral amputees using a passive microprocessor-controlled knee versus an active powered microprocessor-controlled knee for level walking.

Background: In transfemoral (TF) amputees, the forward propulsion of the prosthetic leg in swing has to be mainly carried out by hip muscles. With hip strength being the strongest predictor to ambulation ability, an active powered knee joint could have a positive influence, lowering hip loading and contributing to ambulation mobility. To assess this, gait of four TF amputees was measured for level walking, first while using a passive microprocessor-controlled prosthetic knee (P-MPK), subsequently while using an active powered microprocessor-controlled prosthetic knee (A-MPK).

Eigenfoot decomposition of plantar pressure images and case study of feature prediction of two modalities.

The registration of plantar pressure images is a widely used technique to support human gait analysis. In plantar pressure images, most of the time conventionally derived features are used for further processing. Recently, automatic feature extraction based on PCA and kPCA is being used, to increase the information that can be extracted from this data.

Subject-specific bone loading estimation in the human distal radius.

High-resolution in vivo bone micro-architecture assessment, as possible now for the distal forearm, in combination with bone remodelling simulation algorithms could, eventually, predict patient-specific bone morphology changes. To simulate load-adaptive bone remodelling, however, physiological loading conditions must be defined. In this paper we test a previously developed algorithm to estimate such physiological loading conditions from the bone micro-architecture.