When fitting prosthetic feet, prosthetists fuse information from their visual assessment of patient gait with the patient’s communicated perceptions and preferences. In this study, we sought to simultaneously and independently assess patient and prosthetist preference for prosthetic foot stiffness using a custom variable-stiffness prosthesis. In the first part of the experiment, seven subjects with below-knee amputation walked on the variable-stiffness prosthetic foot set to a randomized stiffness, while several prosthetist subjects simultaneously observed their gait. After each trial, the amputee subjects and prosthetist subjects indicated the change to stiffness that they would prefer (increase or decrease). This paradigm allowed us to simultaneously measure amputee subject and prosthetist subject preferences, and provided a reliability index indicating the consistency of their preferences. In the second part of the experiment, amputee subjects were instructed to communicate verbally with one prosthetist subject to arrive at a mutually preferred stiffness. On average, prosthetist subjects preferred a 26% higher stiffness than amputee subjects (p < 0.001), though this depended on the amputee subject (p < 0.001). Prosthetist subjects were also considerably less consistent than amputee subjects in their preferences (CV of 5.6% for amputee subjects, CV of 23% for prosthetist subjects; p = 0.014). Mutual preference seemed to be dictated by the specific patient-prosthetist dynamic, and no clear trends emerged.

在安装假脚时，假肢师会将他们对患者步态的视觉评估中的信息与患者传达的感知和偏好融合在一起。在这项研究中，我们试图使用定制的可变刚度假肢同时独立评估患者和假肢医生对假肢僵硬的偏好。在实验的第一部分，七名膝盖以下截肢的受试者在设置为随机刚度的可变刚度假脚上行走，同时几名假肢受试者同时观察他们的步态。每次试验后，截肢者受试者和假肢者受试者表示他们更喜欢的僵硬变化（增加或减少）。这种范式允许我们同时衡量截肢者和假肢者的偏好，并提供了一个可靠性指数，表明他们偏好的一致性。在实验的第二部分，截肢受试者被要求与一名假肢受试者进行口头交流，以达到双方都喜欢的刚度。平均而言，假肢受试者比截肢受试者更喜欢高 26% 的刚度（p  < 0.001），尽管这取决于截肢者（p  < 0.001）。假肢受试者在偏好方面的一致性也远低于截肢受试者（截肢受试者的 CV 为 5.6%，假肢受试者的 CV 为 23%；p  = 0.014）。相互偏好似乎是由特定的患者 - 假肢医生动态决定的，并且没有出现明显的趋势。