Design and Product Development

Future Design Challenges for the Firefighter Turnout Boots

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Abstract

Wearing turnout boots has been reported as a primarily negative cause to impact firefighter’s safety and health. Specifically, the poor design of the turnout boots would expose firefighters at the potential risk of fall, muscular injuries, and lumbar injuries. The purpose of this systematic review of the literature was to highlight a design direction for future prototypes, by summarizing the findings of most current studies focused on the firefighter’s turnout boots evaluation. A constrained snowball sampling method selected 10 high-quality articles related to the evaluation of firefighter turnout boots. Seven out of the ten studies conducted human participant tests on healthy firefighters. Out of the twelve design components, only cushioning, traction qualify, structural foot support, stability and flexibility have been considered in the human participant studies. The future firefighter turnout boots designs should also consider the rest of the variables, such as level of protection, waterproofness, durability, and thermal comfort.

Keywords: safety, performance, firefighter, turnout boots

How to Cite:

Li, B. & Gorea, A., (2020) “Future Design Challenges for the Firefighter Turnout Boots”, International Textile and Apparel Association Annual Conference Proceedings 77(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.31274/itaa.11985