SMADA: Towards a smarter digital workflow for pediatric orthotics

🚀 We are excited to officially kick off the project «SMADA – Smart Motion Acquisition & Design Automation» for Next-Generation Pediatric Orthotics, supported by Innosuisse!

🤝 The meeting took place at University Children’s Hospital Basel UKBB – Universitäts-Kinderspital beider Basel, bringing together the project partners from BellwaldTEC, UKBB, and Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz FHNW with its Hochschule für Life Sciences FHNW and Institute for Medical Engineering and Medical Informatics.

From BellwaldTEC, Corentin Féry was present, while the FHNW team, led by Daniel Seiler, and the UKBB team, led by Prof. Dr. med. Heide Elke Viehweger, joined us to lay the foundations for this collaboration.

👣 Why is this important?
Capturing limb geometry digitally during manual correction remains a challenge in pediatric orthotics. Conventional scanning approaches can make it difficult to capture the corrected shape while the clinician is actively positioning the foot.

💡 This is where SMADA comes in.
During the meeting, the UKBB team had the opportunity to test BellwaldTEC’s smart textile and to capture foot shapes in different manually corrected positions.

The project aims to use our magnetic sensor textiles to enable rapid and reliable digital capture of limb geometry during manual correction. By combining this technology with automated pediatric AFO design and 3D printing, SMADA aims to streamline the digital O&P workflow and reduce time, manual iterations, cost, and material waste — with the potential to improve patient-specific fit and outcomes.

🧩 This first meeting was an important opportunity to get to know each other, exchange ideas, and start defining how to implement this ambitious project together.

We are very much looking forward to the collaboration and to the developments ahead!