Impact of footwear on coordination and foot pressure distribution among young adults

Footwear choice and characteristics have an influence on the gross motor skills in the long run. Footwear design, comfort, fitting and other factors have been established to affect balance and equilibrium. Use of equilibrium coordination tests and foot loading to determine shoe designing can prove to be useful. To find out the impact of footwear on coordination and foot pressure distribution among young adults. Ninety five college-going students (age group = 18-25 years) will be recruited for the study. Subjects will be asked to perform heel walking, toe walking, tandem walking and sideways walking tests under barefooted and shod conditions to assess coordination. Then foot pressure distribution will be determined through Harris mat and Podiascan software. Three trials for each tests will be conducted. Six regions of the foot - hindfoot, lateral midfoot, lateral, central, medial forefoot and hallux will be evaluated for foot pressure distribution. Kolmogorov-Smirnov test will be used to determine normality. If the data is found to be normally distributed, the parametric test will be used. The paired t-test will be used to find the impact of footwear on the variables. If the data is not found to be normally distributed, non-parametric tests, such as the Wilcoxon Signed rank test, will be used.