Landing impact analysis of sports shoes using 3-D coupled foot-shoe finite element model

The rapid spread of various sports games has changed the role of shoes from the simple protection of human feet to more advanced ones like competency improvement. Accordingly, intensive research efforts are being focused on the development of high-competency sports shoes by taking kinesiology and biomechanics into consideration. However, the success of this goal depends definitely on the reliable evaluation of the main functions required for sports shoes. As the first part of our study on the landing impact analysis of court sports shoes, this paper introduces a coupled foot-shoe finite element model in order to fully reflect the mutual interaction between the foot and the shoe, not relying on traditional independent field experiments any more. Through illustrative numerical experiments, we assess the reliability of the proposed coupled FEM model by comparing with the experimental results and investigating the fundamental landing impact characteristics of sports shoes.