Comparing preference of ankle-foot stiffness in below-knee amputees and prosthetists.

ABSTRACT: When fitting prosthetic feet, prosthetists fuse information from their visual assessment of patient gait with the patient's communicated perceptions and preferences. In this study, we sought to simultaneously and independently assess patient and prosthetist preference for prosthetic foot stiffness using a custom variable-stiffness prosthesis. In the first part of the experiment, seven subjects with below-knee amputation walked on the variable-stiffness prosthetic foot set to a randomized stiffness, while several prosthetist subjects simultaneously observed their gait. After each trial, the amputee subjects and prosthetist subjects indicated the change to stiffness that they would prefer (increase or decrease). This paradigm allowed us to simultaneously measure amputee subject and prostheti

SUBMITTER: Shepherd MK 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7527979 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature