新式簡易足弓測量系統之信效度考驗

Purpose: The height of the medial longitudinal arch is one of the most important factors to describe foot structure. In particular, people with flat foot and high arch foot have higher injury rate. Footprint is a convenient way to determine foot structure. Current footprint measurement devices use electronic sensor or ink to obtain the footprint which either the analysis process is too complex or the ink is not environmental friendly. Therefore, a new footprint measurement device was developed to determine foot structure without using ink. In order to confirm the accuracy and reliability of this new device, this study tried to determine the correlation between different footprint measurement devices. Methods: 78 footprints were collected from the 39 subjects (7 males, 32 females). The mean age was 22.3±1.8 years, mean height was 162.1±8.1 cm, and mean weight was 56.5±11.6 kg. Subjects were measured two times on each foot by both the new device and traditional ink footprint device. Then the footprint images were scanned into the computer using Sigmascan Pro 5 software to analyze arch index and arch angle. Data were expressed as Mean SD, all statistical analyses were conducted using SPSS The Pearson's correlation coefficient was used to determine the correlation between two measurement devices. Statistical significant level was set at α=.01. Results: The correlation coefficients between new footprint and traditional ink footprint devices were 0.830 (p＜.01) for arch index, 0.628 (p＜.01) for arch angle. Previous studies reported high reliability for using footprint parameters to predict arch height. Therefore, the footprint parameter obtained from this new measurement device can be used to predict arch height and other foot structure parameters. Conclusion: New approach to measure footprint has significant correlation with the traditional ink footprint device. This result shows promising future in clinical applications to use this new footprint device which is more convenient and environmentally-friendly and easier to measure than the traditional ink footprint device. In order to provide more evidence to support this new device, more subjects and direct measurement of arch height should be analyzed in future study.