Towards prevention of sport-related ankle sprain injury - From epidemiology study, aetiology and mechanism analysis, to the design of an intelligent sprain-free sports shoe.

摘要

Ankle sprain injury is the most common single type of sport-related musculoskeletal trauma which causes rupture and tear to the anterior talofibular ligament and ankle instability. In this dissertation, a new paradigm, "Orthopaedic Sport Biomechanics", is proposed to present the role of biomechanics in the practice of orthopaedics sports medicine, including the analysis of injury mechanism, and the design of prophylactic equipment for injury prevention. To directly investigate the injury, a case report of an accidental injury event in laboratory is presented. It was found that an internally rotated ankle orientation at foot strike may predispose the ankle joint to a supination sprain injury, by triggering lateral drift of the rearfoot and the subsequent vigorous inversion. At injury, the ankle joint reached an inversion of 48 degrees and an internal rotation of 10 degrees.;After investigating the injury mechanism, this dissertation aims to design an intelligent sprain-free sports shoe for the prevention of sport-related ankle sprain injury. It consists of a three-step mechanism: (1) Sensing, (2) Identification, and (3) Correction. The progress of this dissertation covers two options of sensing and identification. The first option is to monitor the ankle spraining motion with the ankle inversion angle. A method to employ two tiny inertial and magnetic sensors at the shank and foot segment is adopted as the sensing system. A laboratory study is conducted to obtain ankle inversion magnitude and velocity during various sport motions. Together with the article kinematics reported in the accidental sprain case report, a standard for identifying ankle sprain is established. The second option is to monitor the ankle spraining motion with the ankle supination torque. A feasible method to estimate the complete ground reaction forces with the information from pressure insoles is presented. Then, a tiny in-shoe three-pressure-sensor system is devised to monitor the ankle supination torque during sport motions. With the information of failure torque at the ankle joint reported by previous cadaveric study, an identification system of the ankle supination torque is devised.;Future studies on the sensing and identification process, the correction, and the final evaluation are suggested. We hope that we could really invent the sprain-free shoe to help reducing the incidence of ankle sprain injury in sports in future.