Footwear is one of the most widely and intensively used human centric products. Evaluating and optimizing footwear performance is of outmost importance for human comfort. This paper presents a definition of foot plantar mechanical comfort along with a detailed approach for evaluating it through finite element analysis. An extensive review of biomechanical and shoe mechanical aspects related to human comfort is presented providing ample justification for the selection of the comfort characteristics which are addressed in this paper. A foot biomodel has been developed which is combined with solid shoe structures in order to evaluate plantar pressures distribution and shock absorption. In addition, bending and torsional behavior of shoe structures is also taken into account and, therefore, appropriate finite element models have been developed and tested. All experiments are analytically presented and discussed, while the related results illustrate the potential of the proposed approach to support footwear design optimization under an integrated biomechanics-enabled framework.

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Part 1: Smart ProductsInternational audienceIn this paper, we present a novel approach to estimate the maximum pressure over the foot plantar surface exerted by a two-layer shoe sole for three distinct phases of the gait cycle. The proposed method is based on Artificial Neural Networks and can be utilized for the determination of the comfort that is related to the sole construction. Input parameters to the proposed neural network are the material properties and the thicknesses of the sole layers (insole and outsole). A set of simulation experiments has been conducted using analytic finite elements analysis in order to compile the necessary dataset for the training and validation of the neural network. Extensive experiments have shown that the developed method is able to provide an accurate alternative (more than 96 %) compared to the highly expensive, with respect to computational and human resources, approaches based on finite element analysis

This paper presents current research results that concern the generation of foot bio-models for performing finite element analysis for footwear design evaluation and optimization. The foot bio-models produced so far include complete geometric models of the foot bones along with their corresponding material properties. For the generation of the bones geometry a dense set of CT scan data is utilized. Four different approaches for the reconstruction of the corresponding 3D surfaces are presented and discussed. A preliminary FE analysis for simulating foot/ground interaction has been carried out to assert the performance of the chosen material type and properties. Finally, a cloud infrastructure is introduced to provide to the end-users a web-based interface for performing simulation scenarios concerning foot/footwear and foot/ground interaction.

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