The Relationship Between Fabric Softness And Sensory Modes

As an important parameter of fabric handle, softness is one of the most important indicators to evaluate fabric style and it provides a quality guide to fabric design. To quantify fabric softness, people made great efforts to develop subjective softness evaluation methods, to establish the relationship between subjective softness evaluation results and physical parameters of fabric.The common softness evaluation methods include subjective assessment and objective assessment. For subjective assessment studies, researchers usually focus on how the softness evaluating results can possibly characterize the softness fabric samples. However, in these studies the sensory modes, including touching manner and sensory mode, are ignored. As a result, their evaluation results are inconsistent and less compatible. Also, the mean value of subjective evaluations is commonly used in the analyses. This could not help to discover the differences resulting from individual personal characteristics. For objective assessment studies, it was a common practice by using the results from subjective evaluation to establish a correlation to sample's physical parameters. Because of the influence from subjective assessment, there are varieties in the statistic methods for prediction models and also the physical parameters. Therefore, the two methods of softness assessment and their evaluation results are less convincing.Considering that the touching manner and sensory mode may cause different subjective evaluation results on fabric softness, the study includes the following:(1) According to the subjective assessment with three different touching manners, including the laying press, holding bend and pressing bend, the influences of different touching manners and, by these manners, evaluator's gender on softness evaluation are discussed. The regularity of the distribution of subjective evaluations with different touching manners is also analyzed. The results demonstrate that the softness evaluation is not significantly influenced by evaluator's gender. Further, the evaluation results from the three touching manner for any fabric samples obey a normal distribution raw. In addition, there are no significant differences between the holding bend manner and pressing bend manner. But there is a significant difference between the laying press manner and the other two touching manners.(2) From the subjective assessments with three different sensory modes, including visual mode, haptic mode and visuo-haptic mode, the influences of the sensory modes and evaluator's gender on evaluation results are discussed. The regularity of distribution of the subjective evaluations with the three sensory modes is also analyzed. The results demonstrate that the softness evaluation is not significantly influenced by evaluator's gender. Further, the results from softness evaluation with the three sensory modes for any fabric samples obey a normal distribution raw. But for thin fabric samples with a high bending rigidity, there is a significant difference between visual and haptic (or visuo-haptic) modes.(3) In a combination of subjective evaluation on softness of fabric samples and their mechanical properties, the factors which significantly influence softness magnitude under different touching manners and sensory modes are identified and compared. The results show that the factors influence softness magnitude with laying press manner only reflect the static tensile and shearing properties of fabric samples. While the factors with holding bend (or bending press) also reflect the time-varied process of fabric mechanical properties. Therefore, the preferential touching manner for sensory evaluation on fabric softness is fingers touch and bend fabric. In addition, the factors influence softness magnitude under visual mode only reflect the surface property of fabric samples, but the factors under both haptic and visuo-haptic modes with bending press manner reflect many mechanical and physical properties. The rich information about fabric softness can be obtained by subjects under visuo-haptic mode with bending press manner and this is recommended as preferential one for sensory evaluation on fabric softness.To sum up, the results of this study demonstrate that softness evaluation is not influenced by the sensory mode significantly in general. The influence of touching manners and sensory modalities on sensory magnitude is closely related with mechanical and physical properties of fabric samples. Therefore, it is concluded that the preferential method for evaluation on fabric softness is the manner that fingers touch and bend fabric under visuo-haptic modality.