The Reliability of the Associate Platinum Digital Foot Scanner in Measuring Previously Developed Footprint Characteristics: A Technical Note

Abstract

Objective An ink pad and paper, pressure-sensitive platforms, and photography have previously been used to collect footprint data used in clinical assessment. Digital scanners have been widely used more recently to collect such data. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the intra- and interrater reliability of a flatbed digital image scanning technology to capture footprint data. Methods This study used a repeated-measures design on 32 (16 male 16 female) healthy subjects. The following measured indices of footprint were recorded from 2-dimensional images of the plantar surface of the foot recorded with an Associate Platinum (Foot Levelers Inc, Roanoke, VA) digital foot scanner: Staheli index, Chippaux-Smirak index, arch angle, and arch index. Intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) values were calculated to evaluate intrarater, interday, and interclinician reliability. Results The ICC values for intrarater reliability were greater than or equal to .817, indicating an excellent level of reproducibility in assessing the collected images. Analyses of variance revealed that there were no significant differences between raters for each index ( P > .05). The ICC values also indicated excellent reliability (.881-.971) between days and clinicians in all but one of the indices of footprint, arch angle (.689), with good reliability between clinicians. The full-factorial analysis of variance model did not reveal any interaction effects ( P > .05), which indicated that indices of footprint were not changing across days and clinicians. Conclusions Scanning technology used in this study demonstrated good intra- and interrater reliability measurements of footprint indices, as demonstrated by high ICC values.