How reliable are subjective footwear comfort assessments?

摘要

Comfort is one of the most important aspects of footwear (Nigg, 2010). In fact, footwear comfort is a key consideration in product development and for consumers when purchasing footwear. Enhanced footwear comfort has also been associated with musculoskeletal benefits such as a reduced injury risk (Miindermann et al., 2001) and improved running efficiency (Luo et al., 2009). Although previous research has identified scales/ measures to quantify footwear comfort (e.g. Visual Analog Scales-VAS; Miindermann et al., 2002), the reliability of a given individual at assessing footwear comfort on different occasions (i.e. intra-rater reliability) is unknown.