Biomechanical Evaluation of Insole for Badminton Players: A Preliminary Study

Abstract

Study in sports biomechanics is a demand field for any athletes due to the fact that it can contribute a lot for the improvement of sports performance. One of them is a study on badminton games where the athletes are normally perform many movements with a combination of usage of sport shoes and insoles. It should be noted that analysis on the badminton games and insoles are very limited in the literature. Therefore, this paper is presenting an art of development process of three-dimensional model of bone and insole in order to simulate the condition of badminton games via finite element method. Computed tomography images were used to reconstruct the bones using Mimics software whereas insole was developed using Gensole®. The bones were reconstructed by setting a Hounsfield Unit (226 to 3071) to differentiate the cortical bone. Anthropometric procedure was firstly used to develop the insole of Slazenger. For the preliminary analysis, the models were used to simulate the landing phase of the badminton player where the inferior part of the insole were lifted at 2° with a total of 2.57 times of body weight was applied from the bottom of insole. From the results, it is shown that the von Misses stress were observed at the contact point between bones and insole. From the preliminary results, the stress distribution on the insole is higher at certain points, might due to a larger contacted part. Nevertheless, a detail of foot and ankle joint should be developed in the future to mimic the real condition of the landing phase of athletes.