Improving Rehabilitation and Reducing Re-Occurrence of Diabetic Foot Ulcers by Shifting Plantar Pressure with Exo-Tendon and Exo-Skeletal Footwear Systems.

This project brings novel footwear towards commercialization which reduces plantar loading and accelerates and improves rehabilitation after diabetic foot ulcer and minimizes its reoccurrence towards helping people resume and maintain full employment and function. Project objectives include: (1) Iterative prototyping of non-motorized load-reducing footwear, integrating digital instrumentation to enable objective clinical measurement; (2) limited performance testing in both healthy volunteers and target diabetic patient population; and (3) capturing data for future digital modeling. This footwear has the potential to enable researchers, orthotics and prosthetics companies, and footwear companies to see new data that illuminates the opportunities for biomechanical leverage in footwear construction to off-load plantar pressure without motor assist. The expected products for Phase I are: (1) two prototype pair of pressure-reducing footwear, (2) instrumentation to characterize plantar pressure as well as lateral and frontal pressure peripheral to the ankle, and (3) a plan for Phase II effort.