Designing safety footwear that reduces the risk of slips, trips and falls should be a key objective for footwear manufacturers. At the time of this writing, no U.S. government agency mandates performance specifications, nor is there any industry consensus defining slip resistance for PPE footwear in the US. That’s astonishing when one considers that OSHA states that slips, trips, and falls constitute the majority of general industry accidents, cause 15 percent of all accidental deaths, and are second only to motor vehicle accidents as a cause of fatalities. Because there are so many factors that affect slips, trips, and falls, a major area of developmental focus for manufacturers is to assess the coefficient of friction (COF) for footwear under laboratory settings for several different conditions.
To be clear, a coefficient of friction is not technically the same as slip resistance, although the terms are frequently used interchangeably. Slip resistance is defined in ASTM (American Society for Testing and Materials) F1646, a terminology standard, as “the relative force that resists the tendency of the shoe or foot to slide along the walkway surface.”