Prosthetic foot roll-over shapes with implications for alignment of trans-tibial prostheses.

Roll-over shape is introduced as a significant characteristic of prosthetic feet. The roll-over shapes of the Flexwalk, Quantum, SACH, and SAFE prosthetic feet were determined using three methods; two involving quasi-static loading and one dynamic loading. The results show that foot roll-over shape properties obtained by quasi-static and by dynamic methods are similar. Relationships between foot roll-over shape and the alignment of trans-tibial prostheses are introduced that suggest ways to align trans-tibial prostheses without walking trials and iterations. The relationships may explain what prosthetists attempt to accomplish when they dynamically align a trans-tibial limb. They also explain why prosthetic feet with different mechanical properties usually necessitate different alignments, and may explain why a number of gait studies of trans-tibial amputees do not show major gait differences when walking is executed on various kinds of prosthetic feet.

Two-dimensional representation of three-dimensional pelvic motion during human walking: an example of how projections can be misleading.

We investigated the movements of skin markers located on the anterior and posterior surfaces of the pelvis during normal walking. Plots of the vertical versus horizontal displacements of the body-surface markers for a single gait cycle yield characteristic horizontal figure-of-eight patterns, often referred to as Lissajous figures. Some literature citations indicate that these figure-of-eight plots represent movement of the body center of mass in the plane perpendicular to the line of progression. We show evidence suggesting that the Lissajous plot for the body center of mass is U-shaped and that the observed figure-of-eight pattern is due to the location of the marker on the body surface coupled with pelvic rotation. A simple rigid-body model is used to demonstrate that pelvic rotation about the vertical axis can appear as horizontal translations in a planar projection. Even small rotations about the vertical axis are observable in the phase relation between horizontal and vertical displacements of surface markers in the projection. As a result, Lissajous plots of vertical versus horizontal displacements, particularly for points on the exterior of a rigid body, may be strongly influenced by rotations. We demonstrate that Lissajous patterns for the model are similar to patterns for the human pelvis during walking and that pelvic rotation has a large influence on Lissajous patterns (vertical movement vs medial-lateral) plotted from pelvic marker data. This demonstration illustrates how two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional movement can lead to incorrect interpretations.