Approximate Multi-Objective Optimization of Medical Foot Support

Splayfoot seems not serious diseases. However, it cause fatigue in the daily life. It makes breakthrough in track athletic and many other fields in sports. In that sense, if we can solve these problems it might support daily life much comfortable especially for elder people. To support splayfoot, there are some commercial ones. But they just add small amount of support and not made up for each person. Besides, when the height of support is not suitable for patients, it sometimes make situation worse. We have tried it and measured by using myoelectric potential measurement, and see differences of three patients. Even if we use the same commercial support its effectiveness differs to each other and sometimes it make worse. Physical therapists make foot support for each patient but they make them owing to their experience. There are studies on the positions of bone of foot and its portrait of the desired positions has been reported by medical doctors. One of them is called Mizuno [1973] standard. In this study, we tried to design foot support aiming to make portrait of this standard. For that purpose, we use approximate multi-objective optimization using Radial Basis Function network. First, we make some support and try to find characteristic points of spline function. These processes have been measured by X-ray and calculated portraits for each X-ray digital image. Then, we have gone through multi-objective optimization and design a foot support for one patient and made it by hard sponge. We measured it by X-ray again to make sure that the portrait has been done in acceptable position. For validation, we use electromyography again. As a result the foot support by the proposed method shows the maximum reduction in integral of myoelastic. This shows the effectiveness of the proposed method.