Key concepts in children's footwear research: a scoping review focusing on therapeutic footwear

Abstract

Background Reports suggest that children with mobility impairment represent a significant proportion of the population living with a disability. Footwear is considered to be the key extrinsic factor affecting children’s gait and footwear modifications have been historically postulated to assist with locomotory difficulty. Although therapeutic footwear has been considered within the literature, there is a lack of consistency on terminology and paucity on the overall understanding. A scoping review was performed to chart the key concepts in children’s footwear and to establish the range of studies that considered therapeutic footwear. Methods A systematic search of MEDLINE, CINAHL, PubMed, SPORTdiscus, and Scopus electronic databases was performed using MeSH headings and free text terms in relation to children’s footwear. All studies that used footwear as an intervention in children aged 9 months to 18 years with the outcome measures including design, fit, and the effects on development and health were included. Studies were charted by textual narrative synthesis into research groupings dependent on the topics discussed and the methods used in the studies. Results The search yielded a total of 5006 articles with 287 of these articles meeting the inclusion criteria. Two overarching areas of research were identified; articles that discussed footwear design and those that discussed the effects of footwear. Eight further general groupings were charted and apportioned between the overarching areas and therapeutic footwear was charted into three subgroupings (corrective, accommodative and functional). Conclusion Children’s footwear has become an increasing area of research in the past decade with a shift towards more empirical research, with most of the included articles examining biomechanical and anthropometric aspects. However, children’s therapeutic footwear has not shared the same recent impetus with no focused review and limited research exploring its effects. Empirical research in this area is limited and there is ambiguity in the terminology used to describe therapeutic footwear. Based on the findings of this review the authors suggest the term children’s therapeutic footwear be used as the standard definition for footwear that is designed specifically with the purpose to support or alleviate mobility impairment in childhood; with subgroupings of corrective, accommodative and functional dependent on the intended therapeutic role. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s13047-019-0336-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Effectiveness of therapeutic footwear for children: A systematic review

“…Database searches yielded 5003 unique articles ( Fig. 1) with 3 further papers found through screening the reference lists of related reviews sourced from the previous scoping review [24]. From these, 80 articles were identified as discussing children's therapeutic footwear with 23 articles identified for full-text eligibility screening.…”

“…The types of therapeutic footwear interventions that were explored in the 13 studies fell into 2 of the previously defined groupings from the scoping review [24] corrective (n=3) and functional (n=10) ( Table 1). No studies explored the effects of accommodative therapeutic footwear for children.…”

Suicide capacity within the ideation-to-action framework: a scoping review protocol

“… 55 However, this methodology may change due to a greater awareness of the results. 56 As a stepwise method that has previously been used to map concepts in a scoping review (eg, children’s therapeutic footwear), 57 textual narrative synthesis includes quality appraisal as part of the analysis, addressing limitations such as study bias and design. 58 The first step involves grouping the studies into subgroups.…”

Defining and grouping children’s therapeutic footwear and criteria for their prescription: an international expert Delphi consensus study

“… 1–3 Correspondingly footwear has been used both historically and in modern healthcare practice as an assistive aid for children with mobility impairment. 4 5 However, a recent scoping review 6 highlighted that footwear as a clinical intervention for children lacks a common understanding of terms and definition as to the specifics of its clinical role. The development of recognised terms, definitions and characteristics of a healthcare intervention afford an understanding of how it should work, the value it should provide, who should benefit, how to measure its success, what risks are present and what is and is not included within the intervention.…”

“…The development of recognised terms, definitions and characteristics of a healthcare intervention afford an understanding of how it should work, the value it should provide, who should benefit, how to measure its success, what risks are present and what is and is not included within the intervention. 7 8 The scoping review 6 demonstrated that numerous terms have been used in the literature concerning clinical footwear interventions, including orthopaedic shoes, rehabilitative boots, modified shoes, supportive shoes and special shoes. Additionally, there was no clear definition of the clinical role and outcome measures to classify and group the range of available children’s footwear interventions.…”