Optimization of fitting leg orthoses to patients

A lot of small children suffer from problems with deformation of legs. Fortunately, this can be healed with so called orthoses, brace-like devices which correct and support the bones while walking, gradually leading to recovery. Orthoses can now be produced by robots, but to allow for this, a 3D model of the brace needs to be prepared.

Preparation of model from the scratch is extremely time-consuming. To reduce the time, it is reasonable to have a library of models, pick a best one which matches the patient best and only tweak its parameters. The picking needs to be based on the actual measurements of characteristic features on the patient’s leg (like knee-ankle length, a set of diameters etc.). This is not an easy task as not all the features are equally important and the knowledge of an expert is needed to pick the best matching model.

I was once approached by a company working on leg orthoses, to write a tool assisting in a process of finding best-matched model of brace in database and export it to the 3rd party software used for fine tuning the model to the patient’s needs. While relatively easy task, this work gave me huge satisfaction – I learned a year or two later that it was already used to help over 1000 children in quicker recovery!

Due to NDA I cannot publish original images, the ones shown here are just to illustrate the concept – taken from the Internet.