(June 5, 2018) - After a two week holiday in early May, CAD WALK is back to work. This past month, that work has started to pay off as our first scientific article has been published and our first plantar pressure dataset has been put online. This month's status update discusses these two scientific contributions.
The CAD WALK Healthy Controls Dataset: Over the past couple of months, we have been collecting plantar pressure measurements from healthy individuals while they walked at their preferred walking speed. A total of 60 individuals were measured and, after a quality control check, the measurements from 55 of these individuals appear to be of good enough quality for research purposes. For each individual, we collected 24 plantar pressure measurements for both feet, along with walking speed estimates for each measurement. Along with those measurements are a record of each individual's age, sex, weight, height, and shoe size. These five factors are important to know not only because they impact how your foot applies pressure to the ground, but also because these factors will be used by our CAD WALK algorithm to estimate what a person's plantar pressure measurement would look like. The full dataset can be downloaded from our data page.
An Article on Footstep Alignment: We also recently published an article entitled STAPP: SpatioTemporal Analysis of Plantar Pressure measurements using statistical parametric mapping in the scientific journal Gait & Posture. This article describes, among other things, how we get a computer to automatically align the plantar pressure measurements from multiple feet so that they all overlap. This alignment step is necessary in CAD WALK in order to compare pressure measurements from multiple feet at each measurement location in space and time. In particular, we will be performing this comparison between a patient's plantar pressure measurement and the measurement predicted for that patient from our software.
That said, the alignment procedure is only one part of the what the article discusses. The second part of the article looks at comparing two groups (for example a patient and a healthy group) using their full plantar pressure videos. This comparison is done using a statistical technique known as Statistical Parametric Mapping (SPM). The result of this SPM comparison is a map showing where in the footstep the two groups show significantly different pressures under the foot. CAD WALK will attempt to do something similar, but through a comparison between a single patient and a group.
Up Next in June, 2018...
