Pressure Beneath the Foot for Older Adults Using an Improved Approach

Abstract

A new methodology is suggested in this research to investigate some parameters of the pressure beneath the foot of healthy older adults. Using such methodology helps to accomplish human gait analysis in more efficient way. It allows reduction the resources, such as time, cost and efforts, required by the commonly used approaches to conduct human gait analysis. It also helps to achieve more accurate results.We recruit a small number of participants to collect data with higher accuracy for the purpose of reducing the resources, and then combining them with published data to satisfy the sample size conditions. Hence, the final results are computed from the combined data.The targeted parameters are maximum force (MF) and pressure time integral (PTI) from four regions of the human plantar, namely whole foot, rearfoot, midfoot and forefoot.Five healthy older adults were recruited to preform two sessions of trials by using 300E F-scan insole sensors. During each session, twelve walks by each participant along a 10-m walkway at a laboratory setting were recorded after wearing appropriate sized shoes with the sensors inserted inside them. We suggested the so-called mean of three steps protocol to extract the higher accurate self-captured data.To obtain the final results from the combined data, we use the so-called weighted mean and standard error.Our findings showed that the new approach comparing to the most commonly used ones leads to more accurate results using less resources. It produced smaller SE’s in all of the eight parameters studied.For the maximum force and pressure time integral, the results of this research indicated that: 1) the whole foot had the biggest values 2) the forefoot region had the second largest values and 3) the regions of rearfoot and the midfoot had the lowest last two values in decreasing order.