Grant: Operating Grant: SickKids-CIHR-IHDCYH New Investigator Grants

The foot is made up of several functional units acting in a complex fashion to produce motion and allow comfortable and efficient gait. In paediatric populations, foot deformity may present idiopathically (e.g. Club Foot) or secondary to common neurological disorders (e.g. Cerebral Palsy). The current gold-standard for the clinical assessment and management of these foot disorders requires multi-segment foot models (MSFMs) that use retro-reflective markers and three-dimensional motion capture technology to analyse intra-foot motion. This approach is time-consuming (2 hours per patient) and requires access to expensive equipment and a dedicated gait analysis laboratory. Previously, researchers, including a collaborator on this project, have derived these same biomechanical quantities from low-cost inertial measurement unit sensors (IMUs) that can be fitted on patients quickly outside of laboratories (e.g. hospital, clinic, or school). To date, validation has only been conducted in adult populations. Moreover, since this pioneering work in 2012, advances in sensor technology and data processing approaches have improved usability and accuracy of these devices. The overall aim of this research program is to develop a MSFM for gait analysis in children and adolescents with foot deformity that can be deployed in resource poor contexts using wearable sensors. We will focus on two populations for which researchers and clinicians involved in this project have expertise (Clubfoot, Cerebral Palsy). The specific aims are to (1) validate a sensor-based MSFM for paediatric populations with and without foot deformity; (2) optimize the MSFM to better reflect key clinical foot biomechanical metrics by merging sensor, marker, and bone imaging data via supervised machine learning; and (3) demonstrate the feasibility of using our MSFM to support clinical decision making outside the gait laboratory. This innovative project will lower the access barrier to state-of-the-are biomechanical foot analyses for paediatric populations across Canada and the world.