Use of SOMs for footwear comfort evaluation

作者：Martinez Martinez Jose M^*; Martin Guerrero Jose D; Soria Olivas Emilio; Bernabeu Jose A; Escandell Montero Pablo; Hernandez Stark Rafael; Serrano Lopez Antonio J; Montiel Enrique

来源：Neural Computing & Applications, 2017, 28(7): 1763-1773.

DOI：10.1007/s00521-015-2139-x

• Footwear comfort
• Self-organizing maps
• Data visualization

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.

• 出版日期2017-7