Foot Orthosis and Sensorized House Slipper by 3D Printing

In clinical practice, specific customization is needed to address foot pathology, which must be disease and patient-specific. To date, the traditional methods for manufacturing custom functional Foot Orthoses (FO) are based on plaster casting and manual manufacturing, hence orthotic therapy depends entirely on the skills and expertise of individual practitioners. This makes the procedures difficult to standardize and replicate, as well as expensive, time-consuming and material-wasting, as well as difficult to standardize and replicate. 3D printing offers new perspectives in the development of patient-specific orthoses, as it permits addressing all the limitations of currently available technologies, but has been so far scarcely explored for the podiatric field, so many aspects remain unmet, especially for what regards customization, which requires the definition of a protocol that entails all stages from patient scanning to manufacturing.