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The CAD WALK Project Officially Ends


(October 1, 2019) - It has been a busy few months here at CAD WALK as we try to bring the project together before time runs out. We have made presentations, finalized some data collection, submitted more scientific articles for publication, booked another public demo, and published another project video. As the project now comes to an official end, we recap the work of the past few months and discuss what is to follow.



Conferences in Canada: In late July and early August, CAD WALK presented new research at the Footwear Biomechanics Symposium, and the 2019 Congress of the International Society of Biomechanics (ISB). The former conference included our presentation on the automated design of shoe lasts using machine learning techniques. Our abstract from that conference is now available online. At the latter conference (pictured on the right), we presented a motivating example of what a system like CAD WALK is needed. We showed that using existing techniques to analyze plantar pressure measurements from a group of Hallux Valgus patients results in a variety of conflicting results. We believe these conflicts are due to inherent variablity in the Hallux Valgus patient population and that existing analysis techniques do not fully address that variability. By analyzing each patients pressure measurement individually, CAD WALK would be able to show this variability, and the work we presented motivating case for us.



Public Demonstrations: This past May, we held our first public demonstration of CAD WALK at the imec FutureSummits in Antwerp, Belgium. The two day event was a huge success and turnout was massive. Below, you can find some pictures and video of our contribution to the event.


As a result of that success, we decided to demo our work again, this time at the Voka Open Business Day on Sunday, October 6th. Our demo will be part of imec's contribution to the event and we will hosted at the imec Tower in Leuven, Belgium. If you are in the area that day, please come and say hi!


18 - Foot pain? Do a little turn on the CAD walk! from imec on Vimeo.




Status and Future Plans: With the project now coming to a close, we still have a few loose ends surrounding publications and data collection. The plan is to continue with these tasks as time permits during the coming months.


With respect to the data collection, we have recently added x-ray measurements of the hallux valgus angles and intermetatarsal angles to our existing pre-surgery hallux valgus dataset. We have also noted which patients in that group had arthrosis in the hallux-metatarsal 1 joint. This updated dataset can be downloaded from our data page. We have also begun collecting plantar pressure measurements from these same patients post-surgery. Our plan is to continue with these post-surgery measurements as long as our schedules allow. As always, we intend to share the post-surgery measurements once collected.


In this project, we had also planned to collect measurements from patients with an ACL rupture. Unfortunately, the scheduling of those measurements never really got on track. Now, with the project coming to an end, we will have to put the collection of those datasets on indefinite hold. We still have ethics approval to collect the data, so we hope that we can find a way to organize the collection of measurements from these ACL patients at some point in the future.


Beyond data collection, we are also in the process of finalizing publications on the project. We currently have 3 scientific articles under review with an additional article in preparation. Once these aricles have been accepted for publication, we intend to publish the CAD WALK source code as well. Keep an eye out on our Facebook and Twitter feeds for announcements on those future publications. Finally, we plan to collect all the publications, presentations, and abstracts from the project so far and place them online at our Zenodo community page in the coming weeks, so also keep an eye out for that.


Finally, I would like to thank all of you for taking an interest in the project over the past two years. We have enjoyed working on the project and receiving your feedback! In the future, we hope to continue our research to advance technology that improves the diagnosis of foot complaints. Until then, long may you run!


Brian G. Booth





Additional Links

The CAD WALK pamphlet from the imec FutureSummits Technology Forum (courtesy of imec and Annelien De Geest).


This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 746614.