Abstract
Foot orthoses (FO) and ankle-foot orthoses (AFO) are the two most common types of orthoses. Custom orthoses provide better comfort and function than prefabricated ones for users. Additive manufacturing is ideal for personalized products such as custom orthoses. The manufacturing time and material cost for additive manufacturing are critical to provide advantages over the conventional methods for fabrication of rigid FOs. In this study, the FO and AFO are designed with the sparse structure and topology optimization to enable rapid fabrication and reduce material cost and weight using fused deposition modeling (FDM). The optimum design can reduce the volume of the FO by 32% and the AFO by 26%. This study demonstrates the benefit and potential of FDM for custom orthoses and identifies the need in design to eliminate the support structure.