Design and Development of a Dynamic Platform for Analyzing Foot Pronation and Supination.

Abstract

This thesis project was directed in looking into the question around the effect of supination and pronation specifically around its effect on our somatosensory system around the foot and secondly how to help researcher understand this phenomenon that occurs in our foot so that these researchers can fill in the blanks and to clear the question around the treatment of excessive pronation and supination. The scope of this project was not directed toward gathering data from the human body and to make sense of that data, but it was directed toward building device that can be used by researcher to aid and help them gather data so the scope of this project was to build a motorized device that can change angle of the foot by tilting the whole foot and this device could be integrated on existing platform that shift laterally which intern creates a unique dynamic motion on the foot and especially on the skin underneath the foot. In this project multiple designs were conceptualized and finally two mechanisms were designed, built, and tested. These two different mechanisms were designed on the same base frame so swapping the mechanism would be easy and simple. The first design was using metal hinge to rotate the plate on the which the foot is placed, and the second design used a 3D printed wedge, and both were connected to servo motor to actuate the motion using lead screws, in addition to that a special locking mechanism was created to remove the load on servo motor. The result was the successful building of both design and testing them from which it was found the metal hinge design achieved the highest change in angle going up to 15-degree angle but failing to take load, and the 3D printed wedge going all the way 9 degrees and passing the load test. The 3D printed wedge mechanism was concluded to be used as the final device as it very close to being ready for experimental usage as the main bulk of building and testing is done, however there is need of refinement in the device such as to do with its electronic and coding to making it easier to use, modification such as using encoder rather than potentiometer or to automate the whole process so the device can be operated by just giving command on the PC can definitely fix a lot of the current issues.