Footwear Design for Hallux Valgus: A Virtual Prototyping with Finite Element Modeling

In this paper, we use virtual prototype with finite element modeling to customize footwear design for hallux valgus foot with the purpose of offloading plantar peak pressure from the local metatarsal head. The footwear consists of two material layers to achieve deformation patterns during foot-insole contact interactions (i.e., soft tissue squeezes the insole FE model). The deformed model of the footwear is exported and a metatarsal pad is added in different placement. From the results of simulation, the metatarsal pad and the deformation synergistically achieve the purpose of decompression, and an optimal design could be found by virtually varying with the position of metatarsal pad.