Determination of stress distribution in women’s shoes during high-heeled gait

This work aimed at investigating loads, strains and stresses emerging in a pair of women’s fashion shoes during high-heeled walking with the general objective to improve the footwear safety. In particular, the resistance of a 11-centimetres heel in women’s shoes was evaluated by experiments under the most common conditions of use (e.g. walking, standing, sitting on a car, getting up from a chair, going downstairs and upstairs, jumping). The heel was substituted by a strain gage instrumented aluminium hollow cylinder with the capability of measuring the deformations in several critical points. These measures permitted to implement a complete time depending stress-strain analysis. Deformations were also related to forces and moments acting on shoes, experimentally deriving these actions for each condition of use. A comparison with stresses generated during standard tests was also performed.