EFFECT OF FOOT BAND ON FOOT ALIGNMENT IN STANDING POSTURE

H. Kuruma¹, S. Tsutsumi¹, T. Nishi², M. Suzuki³

¹Tokyo Metropolitan University, Physical Therapy, Tokyo, Japan, ²Helinx Japan Corporation, Tokyo, Japan, ³Seikei-kai Chiba Medical Center, Department of Rehabilitation, Chiba, Japan

Background: Foot alignment affects whole-body alignment. If the feet are not firmly grounded, this influence ascends upward, leading to knee, hip, and other joint disorders. Fukuyama (2014) reported a high rate of people who do not place the entire foot, especially the forefoot, on the ground during standing.
Therefore, we have invented a band that changes the alignment of the foot and places it more firmly on the ground. The band is made of rubber, wraps around the calcaneus, and places anterior tension on the big toe in the direction of abduction and the navicular bone in the direction of lifting.

Purpose: We compared the ground contact area of the foot and maximum foot pressure during standing with versus without the foot band.

Methods: Subjects were 30 healthy subjects (18 men) with a mean age of 21years. The subjects were asked to stand barefoot on a foot pressure meter (SR Soft Vision; Sumitomo RikoCompany)and gaze 2 meters forward, and we measured the standing ground contact area (cm²) and maximum foot pressure (mmHg). The same measurements were taken after the subjects were fitted with a foot band and asked to walk for 2 min. The data were divided into right front, left front, right back, and left back sections and compared between the barefoot and foot band conditions. The data were analysed using the Shapiro-Wilk test and paired t-test using SPSS ver. 28 (IBM Corp.).The significance level was set at 0.05.
This study was conducted with the approval of the research ethics committee of the affiliated institution.

Results: The results are expressed as the mean value (standard deviation) of the barefoot/foot band conditions. The mean standing ground contact areas (cm²) were 190.5 (30.6)/194.2 (26.2) overall, 51.8 (9.9)/53.5 (9.4) for right anterior, 50.9 (10.2)/52.5 (8.7) for left anterior, 43.4 (6.6)/44.0 (6.5) for right posterior, and 44.4 (8.3)/44.1 (7.1) for left posterior. The overall and right anterior ground contact areas increased significantly. The mean maximum standing pressures (mmHg) were 808.6 (225.6)/737.5 (239.7) for right anterior, 800.0 (270.8)/751.7 (245.8) for right left anterior, 1123.0 (374.7)/1073.8 (306.6) for right posterior, and 1182.8 (363.5)/1107.6 (334.5) for left posterior. The right anterior and left posterior maximal pressures were significantly reduced with foot band use.

Conclusions: Our findings suggested that using a foot band increased the ground contact area, thereby decreasing the maximum pressure of the foot. Since high pressure on parts of the foot causes disability, the foot band seems to prevent injury. In this study, all individuals were included in the analysis without separating good and bad foot alignment. Further differences may have been detected had we included individuals with poor foot alignment based on the foot contact area and maximum foot pressure.

Implications: The use of foot bands effectively corrected foot ground imbalances. Future studies will investigate the effects of foot pressure changes during movement on lower-extremity alignment.

Funding acknowledgements: We thank Heling Japan Corporation for providing foot bands.

Keywords:
foot band
maximum foot pressure
ground contact area

Topics:
Musculoskeletal: lower limb
Orthopaedics

Did this work require ethics approval? Yes

Institution: Tokyo metropolitan University

Committee: Arakawa Campus

Ethics number: 22025