Tag: biomechanics

Posted on

Hewlett Packard announce Arize Custom Orthoses

Press Release:
New Arize Custom Orthoses to Help Podiatrists Relieve Foot Pain for Millions
Arize Orthotic Solution enables podiatrists and orthotists to prescribe custom orthoses tailored to their patients’ specific needs in less than five minutes
July 29, 2021

News Highlights:
Disrupting an industry and improving patient wellness: 77% of Americans experience foot pain.
The Arize Orthotic Solution enables access to accurate, high-quality and custom orthoses helping create lasting and dependable products for podiatrists and their patients.
Simple, easy-to-use solution leveraging HP 3D printing and cloud-based software provides clinics with efficiencies at every step and helps podiatrists improve patient outcomes

PALO ALTO, Calif., July 29, 2021 — HP Inc. today announced the Arize Orthotic Solution, a new end-to-end digital orthotic solution for podiatrists and orthotists. Currently, 77% of Americans experience foot pain and the fast, easy-to-use digital solution upends traditional manufacturing methods and delivers quality custom orthoses and consistent results, every time[ii]. Using a blend of advanced 3D printing and cloud-based software, Arize enhances the development and delivery of custom-fit prescriptive orthoses and streamlines business operations to take foot health into the next generation. Podiatrists and orthotists can capture 3D renderings of a patient’s foot, fine-tune and prescribe personalized orthoses for their patients – all in less than five minutes[iii].

Arize disrupts the status quo with a new kind of efficiency and optimizes customization capabilities not possible through traditional processes[iv]. For example, Arize can automatically detect anatomical landmarks found in the 3D printed foot scan, so that providers can approve or modify as needed. Providers can also adjust details to enhance form, fit, and function, with thin, light, and low-profile orthoses enabled by 3D printing, improving patient satisfaction. Starting with five familiar styles – functional, sports, stability, everyday comfort, and dress/low profile – providers can leverage the design flexibility enabled by 3D printing to tailor the orthoses based on patient need and activity level.

“The Arize Orthotic Solution has increased my clinic’s productivity and has allowed me to be more efficient due to the ease of use and streamlined workflow,” said Dr. Gavin P. Ripp of Premier Podiatry & Orthopedics. “I’ve been using Arize in my practice for the past six months and my patients are excited about the innovative, lightweight, and low-profile 3D printed custom orthoses. Plus, with Arize, I can easily place reorders and I receive consistent fitting orthoses every time.”


Enhancing Process, Driving Efficiency, Empowering Clinicians
The Arize cloud-based architecture streamlines clinic operations and efficiencies, providing access for the clinic’s full staff to all current patients and their prescription status. For example, an office administrator can start a patient intake while scheduling an appointment. Clinicians and technicians can then conduct the 3D scan and make customizations, leaving final prescription submission for podiatrists and orthotists to review. With greater flexibility to tap into the patient profile from virtually anywhere, Arize brings collaboration back into the practice, meaning more fluid operations and less time navigating roadblocks.

“With its Arize Orthotic Solution, HP has married a highly accurate 3D scanning solution, with an intuitive and elegant clinic interface and custom 3D printed designs that are likely to change the orthotics industry for the foreseeable future,” said Dr. Jack Reingold of Coast Podiatry Group of Solana Beach Inc.


3D Printing Helping Podiatrists Improve Patient Outcomes
This new solution is a testament to the digital revolution – taking advantage of HP’s industry-leading Multi Jet Fusion 3D printing technology to help podiatrists deliver individually customized products. For podiatrists and specialty clinics challenged by highly variable, manual processes, Arize leverages proprietary HP innovations in digital software and data intelligence to provide a solution with highly accurate, repeatable, and consistent digital workflows.

“I’m confident the new Arize solution and HP’s future technology roadmap will transform the podiatry market and most importantly improve patient outcomes,” said Dr. Bruce Williams, President, Breakthrough Sports Performance, and consultant to HP. “Arize enables innovative orthotic design and unmatched efficiency for clinics looking to provide the highest quality custom foot orthoses.”

3D printing is a key enabler to help clinics in the shift toward a more circular, sustainable, and inclusive economy. Orthoses produced with HP’s Multi Jet Fusion technology can be made to optimize materials use while delivering fine detail combined with strength. 3D printing also brings production closer to the point of consumption, which simplifies supply chains and drives reductions in carbon emissions and waste[v].

“At HP, we are committed to accelerating entirely new market opportunities and driving the sustainable manufacturing of personalized products across industries,” said Philipp Jung, GM of Arize and Global Head of Orthotic Solutions, HP Inc. “With our end-to-end digital expertise and 3D printing capabilities, we are bringing a new way of working to the prescriptive orthotics business, one that streamlines the way providers serve patients, conduct business, and operate. From innovative design capabilities to cost savings and improved time management, Arize enables podiatrists to provide a higher level of service and better patient outcomes.”

HP has worked closely with an independent Advisory Council consisting of leading industry experts to develop the Arize solution and to design a long-term roadmap to ensure ongoing advancements to help clinicians achieve better patient outcomes. Members of the Advisory Council include Paul Langer, Vice President of Operations for Langer Biomechanics; Sally Crawford, Director of Technology & Data Management at Resilience Code, LLC; Dr. Jay Segel of Segel Podiatry; Dr. Jason Surratt of Northwest Extremity Specialists; and Dalia Zwick PT, Ph.D. a rehab clinical supervisor.

Learn More About the Breakthrough Arize Orthotic Solution
The new Arize Orthotic Solution will be on display in Booth 811/910 at the American Podiatric Medical Association (APMA) Annual Scientific Meeting (The National) in Denver, July 29 to August 1, 2021. The must-attend meeting for podiatrists offers attendees a diverse educational program touching on all aspects of foot and ankle surgery and medicine.

The Arize team will be joined by Dr. Jay Segel on Saturday, July 31 at 9:45 am at the Innovation Café as they present ‘Introducing Arize: an innovative 3D printing orthotic solution.’ Led by Melanie Shelton, Arize Product Manager, see how fast and easy the solution is, and how it can help podiatrists improve business results by improving workflow and providing repeatability with consistent results.

About the Arize Orthotic Solution
Developed in collaboration with podiatrists and leading industry experts, Arize is a new digital solution that helps podiatrists create custom foot orthoses tailored to the patient, quickly, easily, accurately, and reliably. The Arize Orthotic Solution leverages HP 3D Printing technology and aims to further HP’s mission to create technology that makes life better for everyone, everywhere. More information on the Arize Orthotic Solution can be found at ArizeClinical.com.

Footnotes:
American Podiatric Medical Association (APMA), 2014
[ii] Based on internal HP testing, March 2021, that generated multiple orders with the same prescription and matched the hash values for each file from each order for a visual comparison.
[iii] Based on internal HP testing, March 2021. Actual results depend on many factors including patient-doctor interactions and specific patient conditions.
[iv] Compared to traditional manual processes, 3D printing is a digital technology that creates objects by selective addition of material (additive manufacturing). This allows each 3D-printed part to be unique in the same way that each page printed by an inkjet or laser printer can have unique content. 100% customized custom content page-to-page and part-to-part is a capability digital technologies bring to 2D and 3D printing. To learn more, see hp.com/go/MJFWhitepaper.
[v] hp.com/go/sustainableimpactreport2019

Posted on

Is ‘Overpronation’ a problem or not

This gets debated a lot. The views are mixed.

The issues are:

  • yes, pronation is a normal healthy motion
  • yes, there is no definition or consensus as to what is normal and what is overpronation
  • yes, plenty of people overpronate and get no problems
  • yes, other overpronate a small amount and gets lots of problem
  • yes, there are multiple causes of overpronation, so there is going to have to be multiple different treatments. One size is not going to fit all.
  • yes, there are too many who consider themselves experts in this when they have no idea what they are talking about.
  • yes, stick to what the consensus of the preponderance of the research says on the topic and not commentary in social media
Posted on

Mathematician identifies new tricks for the old arch in our foot

Schematic of the foot skeleton showing the arches and typical loading pattern during locomotion

Press Release:

  • A stiff mid-foot is essential for withstanding excessive force when pushing off on the ground for walking and running
  • The arch along the length of the foot was believed to be responsible for mid-foot stiffness. Now, a research collaboration between the University of Warwick and two other universities has illustrated the greater importance of a lesser studied foot arch – the transverse arch.
  • Our research opens new ways to study the foot for future researchers on foot health. Even the definitions of flatfoot are based upon the longitudinal arch and do not consider the transverse arch. Our work throws these standard practices into question but more work is needed to know how to update them.

Walking and running subjects our feet to forces in excess of body weight. The longitudinal arch of the feet was thought to be the reason the feet do not deform under such load. However, researchers from the University of Warwick, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University in Japan and Yale University have illustrated that the transverse arch may be more important for this stiffness.

Past theories of the foot stiffness look at the longitudinal arch, however in the paper ‘Stiffness of the human foot and evolution of the transverse arch’ published today, the 26th of February in the journal Nature, researchers from the University of Warwick working in collaboration with Yale University and OIST Graduate University, propose the transverse arch may play an equally important role.

The collaboration found that the transverse arch is a bigger source of foot stiffness than what was found due to the longitudinal arch in previous work. They also discovered that the transverse arched evolved to become almost human-like over 3.5 million years ago.

This collaboration between Dr Shreyas Mandre, from the Department of Maths at the University of Warwick, Professor Mahesh Bandi, from the Nonlinear and Non-equilibrium Physics Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) and Professor Madhusudhan Venkadesan, from Yale University was funded by a Young Investigator award by the Human Frontiers Science Program.

The authors say that this research motivates further work into the role of the transverse arches in the disciplines of podiatry and evolutionary anthropology. These insights could also inspire new designs for prosthetic and robotic feet.

The role of the transverse arch may be understood in simpler terms by looking at a thin paper sheet. When the short edge is held flat, the sheet is floppy and droops under a little weight. But curl the edge a little and even 100 times as much weight is not excessive.

“Flat thin objects like paper sheets bend easily, but are much difficult to stretch,” Dr. Mandre explains. “The transverse curvature of the sheet engages its transverse stretching when attempting to bend it. This coupling of bending and stretching due to curvature is the principle underlying the stiffening role of the transverse arch.”

But because the foot serves multiple mechanical functions, its structure is more complicated than the paper sheet. Therefore, “flattening” the foot to test the hypothesis of curvature-induced stiffening may have unidentified confounding variables. To overcome this difficulty, the researchers ingeniously disrupted the underlying principle while keeping the transverse arch intact.

“Understanding of the underlying principle enabled us to build mechanical mimics of the foot comprising springs that imitated the elastic tissue of the foot. Disrupting the transversely oriented springs in these mimics had the same effect as flattening them,” explains Ali Yawar, a co-author of the study.

“We disrupted the underlying principle of curvature-induced stiffening in human cadaveric feet by transecting the transverse tissue, which reduced the mid-foot stiffness by nearly half,” said Carolyn Eng, another co-author of the article. In comparison, experiments in the 1980’s on disrupting the stiffening mechanism due to the longitudinal arch only showed a reduction in stiffness by about 25%.

This research also injects new interpretation of the fossil record of human ancestral species, especially pertaining to the emergence of bipedalism. The researchers formulated a measure of the transverse arch to accounts for variations in the length and thickness of the feet. They used the measure to compare related species such as the great apes, human ancestral species and some distantly related primates.

“Our evidence suggests that a human-like transverse arch may have evolved over 3.5 million years ago, a whole 1.5 million years before the emergence of the genus Homo and was a key step in the evolution of modern humans,” explains Prof. Venkadesan. It also provides a hypothesis for how Australopithecus afarensis, the same species as the fossil Lucy, thought to not possess longitudinally arched feet, could generate footprints like humans that were discovered in Laetoli