Non-invasive biomechanical device for the club-foot medical treatment: A robotic rehabilitation analysis

The analysis, synthesis and mechanical design of a wearable biomechanical device for treating the club-foot children malformation is presented in this paper. This system serves as non-invasive alternative method for correcting this congenital malformation in 0-1 year-old children. Robot kinematics and constrained Euler-Lagrange dynamics tools are employed to analyse this malformation, altogether with a quasi-static computational method, and to asses the normal children feet, in order to design a robotic prototype. The 8-months clinical case presented in this paper establishes a preliminary club-foot correction angle of 90%, without typical patient complains, such as those coming from conventional methods, either because of uneasiness and unrest of long-time cast or invasive clinical surgery. The proposed passive noninvasive robotic prototype allows to analyse and to assess the real progress over time and spatial coordinates, which record real data of the betterment of the club-foot malformation.