Abstract
There are a lot of ailments that would lead to foot impair. For instance, cerebral palsy (CP), stroke, multiple sclerosis (MS), hemiplegia, duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) and so on. With the further deterioration of these diseases, gait would become imbalanced and then it may contribute to high risk of fall incidence. Thus, it is urgent to invent a tool to adjust the foot impair. Most of the previous studies had found that the ankle-foot orthoses (AFO) has a significant effect to overcome the foot impair. Studies that investigated the ankle-foot orthoses (AFO) and its effect on patients with foot impair are various and abundant. Nevertheless, there are a little studies that integrated the categories of AFO and its specific effect on patients with foot impair. It is important to integrate the categories of AFO and its specific effect on patients with foot impair because the previous studies had proved that different designs of AFO have different mechanical properties and these would affect outcomes in a way. The purpose of this paper is to review and integrate the published studies on the categories of AFO and its effect on patients with foot impair and thereby offer better guidelines and suggestions for prescriptions and future studies. The publication of all papers about the categories of AFO and its effect on patients with foot impair were obtained from Science Direct(SD), Google Scholar and other peer reviewed journals that were published in English. The keywords used for searching were “AFO,” “material,” “foot impair,” and “systemic review.” There were total 8647 studies regarding these keywords, and 37 studies were eligible to be selected in this research: 2 studies on systemic review, 35 studies on the materials and categories of AFO and its effect on patients with foot impair. Most previous studies had found that the effect of AFO is related to mechanical properties of AFO and disease characteristics. Therefore, this review could provide researchers with more systemic and detailed information about the categories of AFO and its effect on patients with foot impair and promote synthesis of literature.