German team tackles smelly feet
14/08/2009
Scientists at the Hohenstein Institute, the test and research institute Pirmasens (PFI) and the department of measurement technology at the
University of the Saarland claim they have made a major stride towards identifying the cause of smelly feet.
A research team with representatives from these organisation used a sensor-driven system to assess the smell of perspiration.
Their early findings suggest that the structural characteristics of shoes (for example, materials used for the uppers and soles) and socks (such as the fibres) play a special role in the development of odours, adding to the contribution the wearer of the shoe makes to the development of smells owing to the bacterial decomposition of perspiration.
Until now, product development with respect to sensory properties, such as smell, could be done only through a process of trial and error by means of costly tests using human test subjects. A system of sensors for the objective assessment of foot perspiration odour developed under the auspices of the research programme AiF (German Federation of Industrial Research Associations) now provides a future means of avoiding customer returns and the subsequent re-designing and restructuring of shoes.
During the research project, human test subjects wore different combinations of shoes and stockings under realistic conditions in order to generate genuine foot perspiration odour. Throughout the duration of the experiment, in parallel research, the odours generated were objectively assessed with the aid of an “electronic nose” and subjectively evaluated by a “sensory panel” (a group of human test sniffers).
The aim of the research project was to correlate the measurement data gathered by the sensors with the subjective odour evaluations given by the “sensory panel” of human sniffer. This goes some way towards sparing subjective odour evaluations in future, because perspiration odour can be quantitatively assessed using
measurements taken by the “electronic nose” alone. Through this innovation, major savings in time and money can be achieved during the development of shoes, stockings and socks.
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