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Use of SOMs for footwear comfort evaluation

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Abstract

The comfort in footwear is essential because the foot is one of the structures of the human body that supports more weight. Moreover, consumers are demanding ever higher and higher levels of comfort and functionality in shoes. Hence, the analysis of the comfort in the footwear industry is of great interest. This paper proposes the use of SOMs to qualitatively evaluate data related to comfort in footwear provided by the Spanish Technological Institute for Footwear and Related Industries. This work also studies which factors can be decisive when buying footwear, revealing interesting hidden relationships and qualitative patterns. For this purpose, the features that may play a relevant role in this framework, and the crucial relationships between them are studied for the comfort of a given shoe. This study tries to find the way of jointly representing comfort valuations for different areas of the foot with different variables (related to physical characteristics of the testers and characteristics or physical measures of foot-footwear) in order to find out if there is a difference between buying/not buying groups.

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Notes

  1. http://www.inescop.com.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been partially supported by the project funded by the European Comission “Smart tools for the Prescription of orthopaedic Insoles and Footwear (SMARTPIF)”, Grant Agreement 312573. Moreover, this work has been partially funded by the Valencian Institute for Enterprise Competitiveness (IVACE) by means of the project “IMDECA/2013/76: I+D de un equipamiento deportivo de protección térmica y estimación inteligente del confort en prendas y calzado (MASCONFORT)”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. IDAL, Intelligent Data Analysis Laboratory, Electronic Engineering Department, University of Valencia, Av de la Universidad, s/n, 46100, Burjassot, Valencia, Spain

    José M. Martínez-Martínez, José D. Martín-Guerrero, Emilio Soria-Olivas, Pablo Escandell-Montero & Antonio J. Serrano-López

  2. INESCOP, Instituto Tecnológico de Calzado y Conexas, Polígono Industrial “Campo Alto”, Aptdo. Correos 253, 03600, Elda, Alicante, Spain

    José A. Bernabeu, Rafael Hernández Stark & Enrique Montiel

Authors
  1. José M. Martínez-Martínez
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  2. José D. Martín-Guerrero
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  3. Emilio Soria-Olivas
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  4. José A. Bernabeu
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  5. Pablo Escandell-Montero
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  6. Rafael Hernández Stark
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  7. Antonio J. Serrano-López
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  8. Enrique Montiel
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Correspondence to José M. Martínez-Martínez.

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Martínez-Martínez, J.M., Martín-Guerrero, J.D., Soria-Olivas, E. et al. Use of SOMs for footwear comfort evaluation. Neural Comput & Applic 28, 1763–1773 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-015-2139-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-015-2139-x

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