Custom foot orthotics are commonly used in the treatment and prevention of a variety of medical conditions pertaining to the foot and overall body biomechanics. Traditionally, orthotics are made by vacuum forming material to a plaster cast of a foot. Podiatrists have control over the end result through the addition and subtraction of plaster from the cast. Digital scanning and computer aided surface modeling techniques are the current state-of-the-art in orthotics production, yet many podiatrists still prefer to use traditional plaster cast methods, partly due to the superior control afforded by plaster manipulation. We propose a novel state-of-the-art solution that achieves the necessary level of control over the orthotic's geometry in the form of input parameters.

Function space assignment determines the function of all spaces and is essential to the design of a remodeled building. Optimization of function space assignment that relies upon users' activities is difficult due to the lack of quantifiable and detailed data about users' activities. In this paper, an activity-based simulation process model consisting of five phases is proposed and applied to an actual project. The phases include activity data collection, activity simulation, space movement pattern mining, function-space assignment optimization, movement simulation and assessment. The process also allows the building administrator to adjust the optimized assignment to accommodate hard-to-quantify preferences via a variety of indexes such as movement distance, corridor flow, and other space usage-related indexes. Results from application of the proposed model to an actual remodeling project indicated that the model offered the administrator a better assignment than the contracted architect, with a 5.79% increase in the objective function and a 23.92% decrease in movement distance.