COURTESY OF LEIA SERLIN
HEALTH
A Better Foot Forward Albion College student creates high heel stabilizing device for those with arthritis.
DANNY SCHWARTZ STAFF WRITER
L
eia Serlin was having trouble shopping for high heels to wear to her cousin’s wedding. Serlin, who suffers from an arthritis-based auto-immune disorder, was specifically struggling to find something fashion-forward that would also stabilize her foot and allow her to walk comfortably. “It didn’t exist on the market,” Serlin said. Serlin, an Albion College senior majoring in biology and planning to go into dentistry, was in the midst of writing her honor’s thesis comparing dentistry and art. It was then that Serlin came up with an idea: What if there were a device any person could put on their shoe that could stabilize it, arthritis issues or not? Over the past four months, Serlin has brought that idea to fruition — designing, building and testing a high heel stabilizing device for her reimagined honor’s thesis. “It really did come out of absolutely nowhere,” Serlin said. “I was doing my other thesis for a couple months before I came up with this, and I was like ‘could I potentially do this as my thesis?’
and my adviser said, ‘Yeah, why not?’” The goal of Serlin’s thesis is to note if there is increased stability in arthritis and non-arthritis subjects when walking with the device support as compared to those without the support. Serlin has seen a lot of adversity over the course of the thesis, but it hasn’t deterred her. She has never created anything like the device before. She has a background in art, specifically sculpture, metalwork and needlepoint, and some background in sewing, but didn’t have much experience using an actual sewing machine. After weeks spent researching joint stability issues and treatments, Serlin had a plan of picking things apart to resew them to create the device. Many of her materials came from dissecting ankle wraps, ankle braces and brassieres. Then she added stabilization components. Afterward, lace and rhinestones were added for the fashion-forward element. “There was a lot of research that went into the design,” Serlin said. “Once
Leia Serlin and her high heel stabilizer
I had the design done, then I had to actually sew it and make it happen. I ended up making two sizes, using bra extenders for the attachment to expand the ankle as needed.” Finding a sewing machine was even difficult for Serlin, with everybody buying them to make masks in the midst of the pandemic. TESTING HER INVENTION Serlin, though, describes finding test subjects as the toughest part of the project.
“COVID made it really difficult to recruit participants,” she said. “That’s hard anyways, getting people to come to a location to walk around in high heels for 20 minutes, but then you throw in the pandemic. Especially because I’m looking for people with arthritis and that’s a common high-risk category.” Serlin recruited hard on Facebook, Instagram and even had her mother help make calls. By the end of the recruitment process, Serlin was continued on page 36
JANUARY 28 • 2021
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