Recent progress in studying the human foot

Abstract

This chapter has the objective of illustrate some of the work being done on human foot studies in the last years related to its structure and its influence on human locomotion, namely gait, as a mean of detecting physical or pathological problems. One of the aims of this work is to describe the experimental techniques available, some of them developed by the authors, and their fields of application. This description will start with a brief approach to gait characteristics as an introduction to the purpose of using the experimental techniques. First, experimental data acquisition and processing techniques are described, by indicating the type of available systems and then a brief literature review on the research developments on measuring plantar pressures and forces. At last, a section is dedicated to describe numerical techniques and methodologies used today in plantar forces analysis.