BACKGROUND The reconstruction of ankle and heel defects remains a significant problem for plastic surgeons. The following options exist for reconstructing such defects: local random flaps, reverse flow island flaps, and free flaps. However, each of these methods has certain drawbacks. Peroneal artery perforators have many advantages; in particular, they are predictable and reliable for ankle an...

Heel strike detection is an important cue for human gait recognition and detection in visual surveillance since the heel strike position can be used to derive the gait periodicity, stride and step length. We propose a novel method for heel strike detection using a gait trajectory model, which is robust to occlusion, camera view and to low resolution which can generalize to a variety of surveill...

BACKGROUND Impulsive forces in the knee joint have been suspected to be a co-factor in the development and progression of knee osteoarthritis. We thus evaluated the impulsive sagittal ground reaction forces (iGRF), shock waves and lower extremity joint kinematics at heel strike during walking in knee osteoarthritis (OA) patients and compared them to those in healthy subjects. SUBJECTS AND MET...

Heel impact contributes to the stability of bipedal locomotion: the change of trajectory induced at heel strike has a stabilizing effect, and the phase–space volume contraction to which heel strike contributes is a necessary condition for stability. For a given passive walker, there is a slope limit to obtain stable limit cycles. However, this limit can be surpassed if extra dissipation is intr...

OBJECTIVES The aim was to investigate the effect of skin contact between mother and child in pain relief of full-term newborns during heel blood collection. MATERIALS AND METHODS The authors randomly divided 40 full-term newborns into two groups. In the experimental group, the newborn received kangaroo care from the mother before, during, and after the 20-minute heel blood collection. In the ...

The purposes of this study were (a) to determine group and individual differences in oxygen consumption during heel-toe running and (b) to quantify the differences in EMG activity for selected muscle groups of the lower extremities when running in shoes with different mechanical heel characteristics. Twenty male runners performed heel-toe running using two shoe conditions, one with a mainly ela...

Heel ulcers (HUs) are the second most common pressure ulcers (PUs). Despite the significant morbidity and economic cost associated with HUs, there remains a lack of understanding of the basic pathophysiology of PUs because of limited basic research. There are only sparse data regarding the efficacy of prevention aids such as heel padding devices, and these data are based mainly on epidemiologic...

UNLABELLED BACKGROUND Excessive shoe heel abrasion is of concern to patients, parents and shoe manufacturers, but little scientific information is available. The purpose of this study was to describe the phenomenon in a group of infantry recruits performing similar physical activity, and search for biomechanical factors that might be related. METHODS Seventy-six subjects (median age 19) en...

Racehorses are susceptible to underrun heel hoof conformation. often shod with nails placed toward the heel. It is unknown if palmar restrict or alter deformation in a manner that could promote development of conformation over time repeated loading. To determine how addition affects during limb loading, expansion and wall deformations were quantified using rosette strain gauges kinematic marker...