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SYSTEMATIC REVIEW article
Front. Bioeng. Biotechnol.
Sec. Biomechanics
Volume 12 - 2024 |
doi: 10.3389/fbioe.2024.1416499
This article is part of the Research Topic Use of Digital Human Modeling for Promoting Health, Care and Well-Being View all 3 articles
Foot shape assessment techniques for orthotic and footwear applications: a methodological literature review
Provisionally accepted- 1 University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium
- 2 Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands
- 3 Ghent University, Ghent, East Flanders, Belgium
Foot shape assessment is important to characterise the complex shape of a foot, which is in turn essential for accurate design of foot orthoses and footwear, as well as quantification of foot deformities (e.g., hallux valgus). Numerous approaches have been described over the past few decades to evaluate foot shape for orthotic and footwear purposes, as well as for investigating how one's habits and personal characteristics influence the foot shape. This paper presents the developments reported in the literature for foot shape assessment. In particular, we focus on four main dimensions common to any foot assessment:(a) the choice of measurements to collect, (b) how objective these measurement procedures are, (c) how the foot measurements are analyzed, and (d) other common characteristics that can impact foot shape analysis. For each dimension, we summarize the most commonly used techniques and identify additional considerations that need to be made to achieve a reliable foot shape assessment. Finally, we present how different choices along these two dimensions impact the resulting foot assessment, and discuss possible improvements in the field of foot shape assessment.
Keywords: Foot shape, foot assessment, techniques, Measurements, Foot modeling
Received: 12 Apr 2024; Accepted: 26 Aug 2024.
Copyright: © 2024 Danckaers, Stankovic, Huysmans, Booth and Sijbers. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Femke Danckaers, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium
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