Laminitis is not only one of the leading causes of disability and death in horses, it’s also an important cause of emotional and financial turmoil for owners. And for veterinarians, predicting which cases are likely to resolve or have the potential to become disastrous and how best to treat a given case remains a real challenge.

Chief farrier and director of the Applied Polymer Research Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Veterinary Medicine (Penn Vet) Patrick Reilly refuses to be walked over by this devastating disease and is fighting back with a state-of-the-art pressure sensors that can measure the forces at more thanb 1,000 location on the hoof.

"For centuries we have evaluated hoof trimming and horseshoe properties based on our anecdotal experiences," Reilly said. "While useful, exactly how trimming and shoeing affect force distribution on the hoof remains unclear."

Force plates can help farriers and veterinarians gain a better understanding of force distributions, but the "ideal" place to measure the effect of a horseshoe is between the shoe and the hoof rather than measuring the shoe and the ground