Purely Mechanical Plantar Pressure Evaluation Device for Diabetic Foot Assessment in Low-Resource Healthcare Settings

A Resource-Efficient Plantar Pressure Evaluation System for Diabetic Foot Risk Assessment

“…Reactions of healthcare providers in Kenya to the plantar pressure evaluation device designed here supported the relevance and comprehensiveness of the design requirements defined early in this work and suggested that the proposed design largely meets those requirements. Further findings from this qualitative study are presented in [11].…”

“…This reset method is intuitive and does not require any external tools or additional parts. A detailed mechanical engineering analysis of the design was performed, and the precise geometries of the parts were specified based on this analysis, which is reported in [11]. The switches can be engineered to move to the triggered position under a range of different applied pressures, i.e., to have a range of different "trigger pressures."…”

“…A prototype of an earlier but very similar design was taken to Kenya and demonstrated to 20 healthcare providers, ranging from nurses to podiatrists, in July 2022. Further detail on the methods and findings of this qualitative study can also be found in [11].…”

“…The demanding nature of these methods is incompatible with the resource constraints of many settings [9,10], an issue that has received little attention from the international community. As one example of the scale that podiatry resource constraints reach in some regions, it is estimated that there are fewer than five podiatrists in the entire country of Kenya, which has a population of over 53 million [11]. Thus, few diabetic patients in LMICs ever have their DFU risk evaluated [12][13][14].…”