Data-driven design of customized porous lattice sole fabricated by additive manufacturing

Additive Manufacturing technologies enable the fabrication of structures with multiscale complexities without increasing their cost. To take advantage of the unique design freedom enabled by additive manufacturing processes, this paper reports a new design method that can generate a fully customized porous shoe sole. The proposed design method contains five major steps and can generate a fully customized shoe sole with customized features on both macro and mesoscale. Specifically, compared to a conventional flat shoe sole, the top surface of a customized sole can fully conform to the bottom surface of patient's feet, which can significantly reduce the peak plantar pressure. In addition to that, the strut diameters of designed lattice structures can also be customized based on the proposed data-driven design optimization algorithm. By varying the struts' diameters on the different regions of the designed lattice shoe sole, the peak plantar pressure can be further minimized. The case study provided in this paper shows the proposed method that can significantly improve the performance of customized shoe sole. This promising result indicates that additive manufacturing fabricated lattice shoe soles can be a potential solution to prevent or treat diabetic ulcers.