Foot pain affects up to 24% of people aged over 65 years, and is associated with difficulty undertaking activities of daily living, problems with balance and gait, an increased risk of falls, and reduced health-related quality of life. Established risk factors for foot pain in this agegroup include female sex, obesity and chronic medical conditions such as osteoarthritis and diabetes. However, ...

The human foot evolved to provide: (1) mechanisms to limit the excursion of the center of mass during ambulation and thereby minimize the expenditure of energy; (2) a base of support of sufficien dimensions for the stability necessary to maintain the upright position without excessive muscular activity; (3) mechanisms for flexibility to absorb the shock of the body weight and for accommodation ...

The importance of the physician’s role in examining and assessing the diabetic foot is hard to overstate.1-2 Fifteen percent of the 16 million diabetic patients in the United States will develop foot ulcers.3,4 The diabetic foot is responsible for more than half of the 67,000 annual non-traumatic lower extremity amputations in the developed world.5 Lower extremity amputation is 15 times more li...

Bipedalism is a defining feature of the human lineage. Despite evidence that walking on two feet dates back 6-7 Ma, reconstructing hominin gait evolution is complicated by a sparse fossil record and challenges in inferring biomechanical patterns from isolated and fragmentary bones. Similarly, patterns of social behavior that distinguish modern humans from other living primates likely played sig...

Objectives: This paper describes further improvement and preliminarily evaluation of a novel viscoelastic ankle-foot prosthesis prototype. The objective was to control the ankle hysteresis at slow and normal walking speeds. Methods: Inspired by the ankle biomechanics, in which the hysteresis differs based on the gait speeds, a manually damping control mechanism imbedded in the prosthesis for...

Journal of Foot and Ankle Research (JFAR) is a new, open access, peer-reviewed online journal that encompasses all aspects of policy, organisation, delivery and clinical practice related to the assessment, diagnosis, prevention and management of foot and ankle disorders. JFAR will cover a wide range of clinical subject areas, including diabetology, paediatrics, sports medicine, gerontology and ...

BACKGROUND The goals of this study were (1) to present the set of data evaluating running biomechanics (kinematics and kinetics), including data on running habits, demographics, and levels of muscle strength and flexibility made available at Figshare (DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.4543435); and (2) to examine the effect of running speed on selected gait-biomechanics variables related to both running...