Subjective Evaluation of Sport Equipment - Deriving Preference Values from Pairwise Comparison Matrices (P162)

Abstract

Design as well as usability of sport equipment is difficult to quantify by objective measurements. Subjective evaluations of different prototypes could be done by ranking the different alternatives in descending order. Discrimination of complex attributes such as design overburdens the testers. Designers routinely rank alternatives in a variety of settings using a staple of comparison, the pairwise comparison test (PCT). The advantage of this method is that it requires only a simple decision between two alternatives. The focus of this study is to use the PCT for the evaluation of sport equipment to establish this method in sports engineering. We also give insight regarding the procedural method, the underlying mathematical formulation as well as the interpretation of the results. Two applications were performed: first, a ski design test oil a total of 103 subjects oil six to seven alternatives in different ski categories. Second, four different prototypes of anti-slip pads in snowboarding were evaluated with a total of 40 testers at three different skill levels. The strength of the PCT method in decisional effectiveness was existent; the results provide additional information by the ranking in a metric scale of the tested abilities. Because of these advantages the PCT method provides a useful tool for subjective evaluation of sport equipment.