Stiffening the human foot with a biomimetic exotendon

NewsBot · Feb 2, 2022

Members do not see these Ads. Sign Up.
Stiffening the human foot with a biomimetic exotendon
Ryan C Riddick et al
Sci Rep. 2021 Nov 23;11(1):22778

Shoes are generally designed protect the feet against repetitive collisions with the ground, often using thick viscoelastic midsoles to add in-series compliance under the human. Recent footwear design developments have shown that this approach may also produce metabolic energy savings. Here we test an alternative approach to modify the foot-ground interface by adding additional stiffness in parallel to the plantar aponeurosis, targeting the windlass mechanism. Stiffening the windlass mechanism by about 9% led to decreases in peak activation of the ankle plantarflexors soleus (~ 5%, p < 0.001) and medial gastrocnemius (~ 4%, p < 0.001), as well as a ~ 6% decrease in positive ankle work (p < 0.001) during fixed-frequency bilateral hopping (2.33 Hz). These results suggest that stiffening the foot may reduce cost in dynamic tasks primarily by reducing the effort required to plantarflex the ankle, since peak activation of the intrinsic foot muscle abductor hallucis was unchanged (p = 0.31). Because the novel exotendon design does not operate via the compression or bending of a bulky midsole, the device is light (55 g) and its profile is low enough that it can be worn within an existing shoe.
Click to expand...

NewsBot The Admin that posts the news.

Effectiveness of Shoe Stiffening Inserts for First Metatarsophalangeal Joint Osteoarthritis

A continuum framework for evaluating soft tissue stiffening in the pathologic foot

Human foot form and function

Chasing footprints in time – reframing our understanding of human foot function

Fat Is Consistently Present within the Plantar Muscular Space of the Human Foot

The functional importance of human foot muscles for bipedal locomotion

The extensibility of the plantar fascia influences the windlass mechanism during human running

Share This Page