| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺北科技大學 === 製造科技研究所 === 102 === Plantar fasciitis is commonly observed in the patients with heel pain. The etiology is multifactorial, such as abnormal foot structure or overuse injury. Both these factors may lead to excessive loading on the plantar fascia, and then impair it. It is obvious that the plantar fascia bears loading during the period of mid-stance phase and push-off phase. As to the push-off phase, the windlass effect is induced by dorsiflexion of the toes, and brings on the peak loading on the plantar fascia. In clinical practice, the anterior rocker sole is a common orthosis prescribed for the treatment of plantar fasciitis. The effect of orthoses to the loading of plantar fascia, however, is not well investigated. For this reason, the gait analysis and dynamic finite element analysis (FEA) were used in this study to investigate the effect of the anterior rocker shoe designs on the loading of planter fascia during the stance phase of gait.
A three-dimensional finite element foot model, including the bones, the planter fascia and the other soft tissues, were reconstructed in this study. A total contact insole and the anterior rocker soles with 3 different designs of rocker angle were also created. The kinematic data obtained from the gait analysis was used as the boundary conditions to simulate the motion of the foot with different anterior rocker soles during the stance phase, while the kinetic data was used to validate the results from the FEA. The material property of the plantar soft tissues obtained from our previous study was adopted in this study as well.
The result showed that the tensile loading of the planter fascia under barefoot, RBS10°, RBS20° and RBS30° conditions were 1338.2 N, 1077.7 N, 907.5 N and 752.3 N, respectively. The maximal peak von Mises stresses in the plantar fascia near the calcaneal tuberosity calculated 22.2 MPa, 15.49 MPa, 14.04 MPa and 11.87 MPa under barefoot, RBS10°, RBS20° and RBS30° conditions, respectively. As a result, wearing a shoe with larger anterior rocker angle would be able to inhibit the windlass effect, and the peak loading of the plantar fascia will thus be relieved. The validated results from this study can provide a treatment guideline for treatment of plantar fasciitis, and would be benefical to orthotis in the design of orthosis.
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