SBIR-STTR Award

Over the years the usage of force plates as a quantitative gait assessment tool has increased. However, the basic design of this equipment, since its introduction some 50 years ago, has not changed. During a gait test, in order to have correct ad complete ground reaction information for one foot, only that foot should make contact with the force plate, and there should be no contact with the uninstrumented part of the walkway. When subjects with disabilities are tested, collecting such valid data usually becomes a very time consuming task. Therefore, it would be very desirable to have a ground reaction force measurement system where this limitation in the test protocol has been eliminated. The specific aim of this proposal is to study the feasibility of developing a force plate system which will facilitate gait analysis of the disabled and the elderly population. PROPOSED COMMERCIAL APPLICATION This research has the potential of developing a system which will make current force plate systems obsolete. The proposed system is expected to be cost effective and affordable in the clinical setting as well as the research setting. This system will be an extremely important improvement in the diagnosis of gait disorders, determining intervention and treatment procedures, and in tracking patient progression through a treatment protocol.

Thesaurus Terms:
clinical biomedical equipment, gait, measurement, mechanical stress, orthopedics computer data analysis, footNational Institute of Child and Human Development (NICHD)

A force plate array consists of a matrix of small six-component load transducers. A typical force plate used in gait studies is approximately two feet long and one and a half feet wide. The major limitations of the use of current force plates are the need of some means of targeting, numerous trials, and long periods of time in order to obtain valid data. In Phase I it was determined that it is feasible to develop a force plate system, which will eliminate the above mentioned limitation of conventional force plates. Phase II's aim is to develop a working prototype of the force plate array system using the optimized force plate array dimensions from Phase I. The proposed design will have the potential to positively influence gait analysis performance by allowing for over 92.1 percent of the population to be successfully tested with greater than or equal to 50% probability of collecting two consecutive foot falls (over a 6000% improvement compared to two conventional force plates, and a 1500% improvement compared to one conventional force plate). The prototype to be developed under Phase II will lead to a commercially available product in Phase III. PROPOSED COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS: Through the feasibility study of Phase I it was found that developing a force plate array system is technically and more importantly economically feasible. The system will be the first of its kind, will be available at a price comparable to current force plates, and will dramatically improve gait analysis performance.