August 22, 1988
A MACHINE THAT’S A STEP AHEAD OF FOOT INJURIES
A state -of-the-art machine that measures and analyzes human gait in a matter of minutes was introduced recently at the American Podiatric Medical Association Convention in Anaheim.
Developed by the Santa Rosa high-tech company Motion Analysis in conjunction with sports medicine podiatrist John Hollander, the machine, known as FootTrak, promises to eliminate a great deal of the diagnostic guesswork faced by the fitness walker, jogger, or runner who is plagued with lower extremity injuries.
“In the past, analyzing gain problems by medical professionals was an art,” Hollander said. “Unfortunately, only a very few professionals were intrinsically artists. With the FootTrak, medical professionals are able to measure a foot or gait problem by science.”
What the $35,000 computer system does is both simple and complex. A patient has two retro-reflective discs placed on the back of each lower leg. Inside the shoe goes a triggering plate to indicate impact and toe-off.
When the patient walks or runs on a treadmill, a nearby lightbar receives impulses from the triggering plate, and a video camera records the motion of the discs. All the information is fed into a computer that isolates each leg and delivers in minutes results that used to take a week to calculate.
The benefits of a high-tech tool such as FootTrak are obvious. In the past, podiatrists and orthopedic surgeons depended on the human eye to prescribe strengthening exercises, improved biomechanic styles, orthotic devices, or different shoes based on types of injuries or gait characteristics. The FootTrak system makes hundreds of objective impressions per second, runs them through a computer, and spits out a coldly clinical estimate of which biomechanical factors are working.
Hollander sees the machine as a boon to his profession. “There was a tendency in the past to over-prescribe for foot and leg problems in an attempt to help the patient,” he said. “Sometimes this over-prescription would take the form of orthotic devices or surgery, when perhaps a more conservative treatment would have worked.
“The FootTrak is so precise that a runner could bring in a half-dozen different running shoes and in a half-hour we could tell him which shoe best addresses his unique biomechanical needs and which shoe does not.”
Ultimately, besides placing the FootTrak system in podiatrists’ offices, Hollander and Motion Analysis hope to develop a simpler and less expensive version that fitness show stores could use to match more precisely the correct shoe to each customer’s foot.
During the next several weeks, FootTrak will be tested in a number of hospitals throughout the United States in order to wring out the last of the computer gremlins.