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Canberra firefighters are suffering injuries more commonly seen in skiers – and it looks like their footwear is to blame. The boots worn by ACT firefighting crews are believed to have caused an unusually high number of back, knee, and hip injuries over the past decade, said University of Canberra assistant professor Wayne Spratford. "We looked at their boots and found they used a boot that constrained the ankle – basically the ankle can't move," he said. "Your ankle acts as a shock absorber to your body and if you constrain it, it can't absorb the forces. And the forces that occur get pushed further up the chain of the body so rather than the ankle absorbing forces it goes to the knee, hip and lumbar, a bit like how a ski boot works." In a joint research project with ACT Fire and Rescue and the Justice and Community Safety directorate, the University of Canberra's Research Institute for Sport and Exercise will use motion capture technology to determine how different footwear affects the force travelling through a firefighter's bodies as they carry out drills. Key to the research will be how a fixed versus flexi ankle boot changes the impact on the ankle, hip, knee, pelvis and lumbo-pelvic regions. "We'll use reflective markers and 3D analysis that will allow us to model their movement then we'll use force tape embedded into the ground and then we'll tape force vectors and model those and run those through each joint," Assistant Professor Spratford said. The fire brigade initially adopted the fixed ankle boots due to a high number of ankle injuries. Assistant Professor Spratford said ACT Fire and Rescue would most likely take the research to a manufacturer to craft a boot with a hinge and possibly a shorter shaft. It is the first time the technology has been used to monitor the impact firefighter boots have on crew members. "There's been studies done into how other sporting shoes constrain the ankle but not firefighting boots specifically, and doing firefighting activities," Assistant Professor Spratford said.

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