Abstract
Most patients with osteoarthritis of the knee (OA knee) have cartilages that are worn out and transformed inside of the knees. Structurally, the load rests upon the inside of the knees when the tibia doesn't rotate externally against the thighbone. Therefore, we believe that a good method for preventing OA knee is to rotate the tibia externally against the thighbone. To enable this we developed shoes, which we call SHM shoes, to suppress Reverse-SHM. The soles of the shoes have screw-shaped rubbers which create external rotational moment when landing. In this paper, we examined the effectiveness of the SHM shoes. The subjects were three females without OA knees in Experiment 1 and three females with OA knees in Experiment 2. They walked wearing normal shoes and four kinds of SHM shoes. We measured the angles of tibia rotation against the thighbone. As a result of the experiments, compared to actions when normal shoes were worn, it was shown that the patients' tibia rotated externally immediately after the soles contacted the ground at all times SHM shoes were worn. In other words, the results suggest that SHM shoes are able to curb Reverse-SHM.
