Barefoot Slip Risk in Indian Bathrooms: A Pilot Study

Abstract Barefoot slips and falls are commonly reported in bathrooms in Indian households and apartments. Due to lack of awareness on how to prevent such incidents, they are often neglected, and may lead to recurrent and severe traumatic injuries. To date, there is no way to assess the barefoot slip risk of the bathroom flooring tiles under realistic contaminated conditions such as with water and shampoo. In this work, a novel human heel surrogate was developed for barefoot slip testing, to address this gap. This surrogate was tuned to precisely mimic the frictional and biomechanical properties of the human heel, through three-dimensional (3D) scanning and printing. A mechanical slip testing device was employed with the heel surrogate to test 15 different bathroom floorings in residential apartments in dry and slippery conditions (i.e., wet and with shampoo spill). The barefoot available coefficient of friction (ACOF) was determined for the different floor conditions and tested for repeatability with two modeled heel surrogate samples. Also, the correlation of ACOF with surface roughness and between floorings was studied, across contaminant conditions. High repeatability (r 2 > 0.92) was confirmed in the dry condition, and the ACOF values decreased significantly when going from dry to wet and wet to shampoo spill conditions. The correlation of ACOF with surface roughness was found to be high (r 2 = 0.72), medium (r 2 = 0.62), and low (r 2 = 0.38) for the dry, wet, and shampoo spill conditions, respectively. Across contaminant conditions, several tiles exhibited high correlations in ACOF due to shampoo spills, indicating generalizability of barefoot slip risk. The findings of low barefoot frictional resistance on Indian bathroom floorings in wet and shampoo spill conditions, lack of correlations with surface roughness, and high generalizability of slip risk across floorings in the shampoo spill condition have not been reported to date, and shed light on the significant barefoot slip risks.