Bare Footprint Reagent Cream

The first days in the lab will be used to practice with collecting bare footprints from different individuals using the bare footprint reagent cream. To get access to the lab, a Practical Risk Assessment must be made (see appendix I), and three Health & Safety courses must be completed (see appendix II).

After practicing with collecting bare footprints, the study starts with collecting footprints from six specific participants, whose footprints have already been collected by two other investigators. The participants will be residence of the United Kingdom and over the age of 18 years. A consent form and information sheet (see appendix III and IV) will be required prior to the collection of bare footprints to enable the participants to participate anonymously in the research and to give information about the research. The participants will be asked to fill in a questionnaire to obtain information about foot irregularities, age, sex, height, weight, ethnic group
This will be done as described above. Also in this case, 12 footprints will be collected from each participant, six from each foot. The footprints will also be scanned and stored in TIFF or RAW format to measure the footprints using GIMP. Linear measurements and angle dimensions will be used as quantitative data for the database and other variables like ethnicity, age, sex etc. as qualitative data. Once all the measurements are successfully recorded, the measured image(s) will be stored in Microsoft Access Database (MAD). After this, statistical analysis will be used to interrogate the data. This will be done using ANOVA, MANOVA and PEARSON CORRELATION methods to investigate the inter and intra variations or correlations in the four different ethnic population groups (Afro-Caribbean, Chinese, Indian and Caucasian). The statistical analysis will be performed using the Statistical analysis software package