| dc.description.abstract | In recent years, biomechanics and sport medicine advance vigorously and make the people gradually pay much attention to the foot diseases. Common foot diseases include high bow foot, flat foot, bunions, overpronated foot , fasten foot, calluses, corn, plantar fasciitis, and heel spur, etc. In the past, a lot of orthopedists and therapists have put considerable manpower and material into this field to devote to finding out about the cause of symptom, treatment, and health care of the foot diseases.
At present, the clinical treatment of the foot diseases can be divided three stages: medication, orthosis, and operation. The general procedure of foot orthosis is firstly to diagnose foot symptom, then measure foot information, and fabricate suitable orthosis to treat patient finally. On the market, the basic foot information by the foot measurement system can be divided into two kinds of parameters: foot appearance and foot pressure. While examining the foot appearance by the commercially available systems, the optical scanner is commonly used to measure the length and width of foot and heel. However, the calculation of the contact area between the foot and the ground or shoe is still unsatisfactory and remains as the main shortcoming of those measurement system. For a long time, the photos of footprint have been used to predict the pressure distribution over the foot surface. One of the advantages of this footprint method is the lower cost of the measurement system. Nevertheless, the accuracy of the predicted foot pressure is doubtful and the verification of the predicted results is necessary. If this technique is cautiously performed and the result is acceptable, the programming digitization of the photos of footprint can be performed to calculate the pressure distribution of the different foot regions. The more advanced technique uses the piezoelectric sensors to measure the contact pressure between the foot and the surroundings. Although the accuracy of the measured result is higher, the purchase and maintenance of such kind of the measurement system is too expensive to be widely accepted by the foot clinicians and orthotic manufactures. The researchers are firstly to computer-aided system of the synchronized measurement of foot appearance and pressure. In the future, the use of the current computerized system is anticipated to facilitate the research of the foot clinicians about the foot medicine, biomechanics, epidemiology, and orthoses. | en_US |