To implement and evaluate a heel pressure ulcer prevention program (HPUPP) for orthopaedic patients. Program development of HPUPP involved input from administrators, staff and adult patients on an orthopaedic service in an academic tertiary care facility, located in a small urban centre in Canada. Prospective evaluation was conducted. Consensus exercises with clinical staff and administrators (...

Heel ulcers (HU) are the second most common type of pressure ulcers. In this work, we developed the first anatomically-realistic three-dimensional finite element model of the posterior heel for studying the risk for HU in bedridden patients. We specifically simulated a heel that is resting on supports with different stiffnesses at upright and inclined foot postures. Our objective was to examine...

BACKGROUND It has been proposed that high-heeled shoes may contribute to the development and progression of knee pain. However, surprisingly little research has been carried out on how shoe heel height affects muscle activity around the knee joint. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of differing heel height on the electromyographic (EMG) activity in vastus medialis (VM) and...

OBJECTIVE The objective of the study is to evaluate whether chest compressions using the heel provide a more effective method than manual compressions for bystanders. METHODS This is a cross-sectional observational comparison study where each subject acted as his or her own control. A 49-person cohort whose age distribution approximated that of sudden cardiac arrest victims were asked to perf...

Heels are the second most common anatomical location for pressure ulcers. A combination of risk factors, including pressure, may cause ulceration. Heel pressure ulcers are a particular concern for surgical patients. A review of the literature, including poster presentations, shows that controlled clinical studies to assess the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of available interventions are ...

A laboratory study was conducted to evaluate if two different age groups(young vs. old) had differences in walking velocity and heel contact velocity and, furthermore, if these gait characteristics could adversely influence initial friction demand characteristics(i.e. RCOF) and the likelihood of slip-initiation. Twenty eight(14 younger and 14 older adults) participated in the study. While weari...

BACKGROUND The reconstruction of ankle and heel defects remains a significant problem for plastic surgeons. The following options exist for reconstructing such defects: local random flaps, reverse flow island flaps, and free flaps. However, each of these methods has certain drawbacks. Peroneal artery perforators have many advantages; in particular, they are predictable and reliable for ankle an...

Heel strike detection is an important cue for human gait recognition and detection in visual surveillance since the heel strike position can be used to derive the gait periodicity, stride and step length. We propose a novel method for heel strike detection using a gait trajectory model, which is robust to occlusion, camera view and to low resolution which can generalize to a variety of surveill...

BACKGROUND Impulsive forces in the knee joint have been suspected to be a co-factor in the development and progression of knee osteoarthritis. We thus evaluated the impulsive sagittal ground reaction forces (iGRF), shock waves and lower extremity joint kinematics at heel strike during walking in knee osteoarthritis (OA) patients and compared them to those in healthy subjects. SUBJECTS AND MET...

Heel impact contributes to the stability of bipedal locomotion: the change of trajectory induced at heel strike has a stabilizing effect, and the phase–space volume contraction to which heel strike contributes is a necessary condition for stability. For a given passive walker, there is a slope limit to obtain stable limit cycles. However, this limit can be surpassed if extra dissipation is intr...