Design and Development of a CAD/CAM System for Foot Orthotics

The aim of the project is to design, develop and test scanning equipment to acquire three dimensional data of a foot sole surface, and to use CAD and CAM tools to design a digital orthoses shell with its geometry adapted from digital 3D scan data. Experimental tests are also done to test the reliability and repeatability of foot surface where data generated from 30 sets of measurements is analyzed using various statistical tools such as standard deviation, correlation and regression analyses. Results show that a strong positive and linear correlation exist between computer generated measurements and the mean of manual measurement.