On developing a method to customize ankle-foot orthosis using foot contour feature points

We developed an automatic design programme to manufacture customized ankle-foot orthoses (AFOs). This kind of customized AFOs were much suitable for patients, because they prevent rubbing against foot and orthosis. First, we used a 3D scanner to obtain the foot 3D model, and then entered the data into software for fabricating a customized AFO through the characteristics of the foot geometry obtained. In order to find out the patient’s foot feature points, we transformed the 3D scan data into 2D planes, and searched the feature points by calculating contour’s curvature. Finally, we used feature points to do polynomial planning and generated a 3D AFO model by integrating all 2D planes.