(April 26, 2018) - It is almost vacation time here at CAD WALK, but before we disappear for a couple of weeks, we'd like to give you brief update on what we've accomplished over the past month. It was a busy month, so let's dive right in!
Ethics Approval and Data Collection: About ten days ago, we received word from our nationally-accredited medical ethical research committee that CAD WALK meets all ethical guideline in the Netherlands and that our study can be carried out. This approval completes the final of our ethics review process and gives us the ability to begin measuring foot pressure from our patient groups: patients with ACL tears and patients with Hallux Valgus.
While waiting for that final ethics approval, we have been collecting foot pressure measurements from healthy individuals. Our goal was to measure 60 healthy individuals and we are happy to report that 53 people have already been measured. The remaining seven healthy participants will be measured this coming month, and once we have completed some basic quality control on the collected pressure measurements, we will make them available on this website. We intend to do the same with our patient populations too.
A Trip To New York: In the second week of April, CAD WALK joined fellow biomechanics researchers in New York for the 2018 meeting on foot and ankle biomechanics. The meeting was a busy and productive one. We were especially encouraged by the number of participants who were looking for statistical techniques that are more descriptive than the simple averages and variances currently used in the field. We also were happy to hear that researchers were looking for ways to compare pressure measurements between individuals instead of comparing measurements between groups (e.g. patients vs. healthy controls). We feel that the CAD WALK project can address both of these challenges.
Miscellaneous Updates: We are also pleased to report that our first scientific article related to CAD WALK has been accepted for publication. The article entitled STAPP: SpatioTemporal Analysis of Plantar Pressure Measurements using Statistical Parametric Mapping will soon appear in the scientific journal Gait & Posture, so keep an eye out for that. We are also close to completing the fine tuning on the CAD WALK algorithm and are preparing for its validation and testing stage. Finally, meetings continue on an intellectual property agreement between the project's partners, and progress is being made there (though not much can be made public). All in all, it has been a productive month and the project remains on schedule for a successful result.
Up Next in May, 2018...
