A Sensorised Lattice Footplate for a Semi-Active Prosthetic Foot
For prosthetic foot designers, this work shows a method to integrate sensing directly into the structure, potentially reducing complexity and cost, but the results are preliminary and the approach is incremental.
This paper demonstrates that magnetic plantar sensing can be embedded inside the load-bearing compliant element of a low-cost semi-active prosthetic foot, enabling plantar-force estimation without an external insole layer and allowing feedforward damping control that approximates a reference ankle trajectory through early-to-mid stance.
This paper investigates whether magnetic plantar sensing can be embedded directly inside the load-bearing compliant element of a low-cost semi-active prosthetic foot. We present a prototype integrating a sensorised 3D-printed lattice footplate, a servo-adjustable hydraulic damper, and a reduced-order ankle model. The damper is experimentally characterised to relate adjustment angle to damping coefficient. Controlled compression tests show tunable lattice stiffness, while cyclic normal loading shows that the embedded sensor tracks the testing-machine reference force, supporting plantar-force estimation without an external insole layer. Static-posture trials under approximately body-weight loading show that forefoot and rearfoot loading distributions are separable across four prescribed stance configurations, providing a preliminary check of the sensing pipeline. A feedforward damping schedule approximates the dorsiflexion trend of a reference ankle trajectory through early-to-mid stance, while exposing the expected limitation that a purely dissipative mechanism cannot generate active push-off. Together, these results demonstrate that sensing can be embedded inside the load-bearing compliant element of a prosthetic foot and used to drive semi-active damping.