The majority of North Americans suffer from foot problems at some point in their lives. These foot problems can be divided into three domains ranging from mismatch on healthy feet, to small injuries and deformities and extreme sensitivity and deformities. A solution to these problems is the development of corrective shoes. The design of corrective shoes involves three steps: first, the measurement or digitization of the foot to create a model; second, the manipulation of the model and last creation; third, constructing the shoe with the last. This work focuses on developing a foot digitization system or scanner for each of the three problem domains. A good digitization paves the way for development of foot manipulation algorithms and last manufacturing techniques that can be applied to develop well fitting comfortable shoes.
Three scanning methods were investigated in this work. The first was designed for scanning near normal feet and automatically building a 3D approximation of the plantar surface of the foot. This digitizer was successfully built and demonstrated. The second scanner was designed to scan the entire 3D surface of the foot. This scanner was built and used to extract data for building complete 3D models of the foot. The last scanner was designed to measure and modify the pressure distribution of the loaded foot on a controllable surface. This scanner is more capable in creating an optimal corrective shoe, but is more expensive. A pin matrix design was selected and subsystem prototypes were successfully produced and tested.
The first two developed designs provide low cost solutions for modeling feet, for the purposes of corrective shoe and insole creation. The third design explores a method of measuring foot pressure and distributing it via control of a 3D surface upon which the foot is supported.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:WATERLOO/oai:uwspace.uwaterloo.ca:10012/6188 |
| Date | 26 August 2011 |
| Creators | Besliu, Dragos |
| Source Sets | University of Waterloo Electronic Theses Repository |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis or Dissertation |
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