Methods for modeling footwear foam stiffness

[Michael McGeehan]

Hello,

I am working on a project that requires me to account for the stiffness of foam in footwear.

Is it possible to model foam with a known stiffness in OpenSim 4.0? Does anybody have suggestions for methods to accomplish this?

Thank you!

[jimmy d]

I am working on a project that requires me to account for the stiffness of foam in footwear.

Did you collect ground reaction forces? If you did, then the dynamics of the foam are already captured in the Forces. It really comes down to your question; if you are looking at assessing the local changes in the shoe/foot then you may need to use a finite element package.

[Michael McGeehan]

Thanks for the reply, James. Yes, I do have GRFs for my gait data. For the reasons that you mention above, accounting for foam stiffness is not an issue with those data. However, I am hoping to perform some simulations in the absence of GRFs. Is FEA my best bet for this?

Thanks!

[jimmy d]

Regardless if you have foam or not, you can add Contact elements as replacements to the GRFs, but you have to tune the Contact parameters. Since you already have data collected of the GRFs with foam, you could run an optimization that does the tuning.