That is, it applies an actual shoe to a test surface, not just a small sample of material cut from a shoe, and it can do it in an actual workplace. Although there have been nearly 100 tribometric devices mentioned in the scientific literature over the past half-century, the vast majority have been designed primarily to meter the slipperiness of walking surfaces, and are only secondarily used to evaluate the traction properties of shoe bottom materials and surface treatments. The XST is the first shoe tester to apply a whole shoe to a test surface much like the human foot does in walking, and it can do it right on the workplace floor . Because of its explicit purpose as an evaluator of shoe traction, it is called the English XST Shoe Traction Tester. Although ASTM's F13 Committee on Safety and Footwear Traction has as its primary role the development of means of measuring shoe traction performance against a reference value, over the 20 years that I have been an observer of its activities, there has never been a satisfactory device for testing the performance of a shoe product in the presence of various contaminants in which shoes are required to function.
Today there is still no ranking or rating system and no labeling standard.
Many shoe sellers are advertising footwear for slip resistance under various conditions and various claims are being made for shoe performance in the presence of lubricating contaminants without objective substantiation. Some shoes now on the market do in fact perform very well, but others perform poorly despite the seller's claims. Further complicating the pedestrian safety climate is the fact that testing laboratories are doing a lot of evaluation of both shoe bottom assemblies and shoe bottom material samples using invalid test methods . Over my objection these obsolescent standards have been renewed again for the alleged reason that the subject is so important that we need to keep the old standards in place to sort of hold their place until a valid tester can be perfected. Since then the production version of the XST has been developed.