The rise and fall of the smart shoe

The other day I was clearing out my old running gear when, at the back of my shoe-drobe (that’s a thing if you’re a runner), I came across an old battered pair of Nike trainers. But these weren’t just any old trainers, they were theNike+ training shoes from way back in 2012.

What was special about these shoes was that they were smart. They had a set of three pressure sensors built into the shoes that could detect things like ground contact and foot speed, the kind of stats you need to turn loads of previously unquantified fitness activities into cold hard data.

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At the launch of the shoes Nike wheeled out boxing legend Manny Pacquiao to prove the point. We got a demo of Manny’s lightning fast feet skipping rope all the while the Nike+ training system logged every skip with impressive accuracy. This is the future, I remember thinking “this is how to bring fitness to life.”

Fast forward to 2015 and the crumpled Nikes I’m about to throw out suggest that future isn’t quite here yet. In fact, while we’ve seen a million Kickstarter campaigns for everything from jewellery, clothes, yoga mats and even heart rate monitoring headbands, we’re yet to see our shoes get smart.

What makes it more interesting is that Nike weren’t the only ones putting chips in shoes. Adidas MiCoach had a shoe pod that helped power the tracking on the MiCoach running app, as did Garmin and Polar. Our football boots looked like they were going to get smart too, with more Adidas MiCoach chips clocking all kinds of stats from acceleration of your sprints to the power of your last strike on goal.

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Nike themselves had been working on an even more advanced version of the Nike+ Training system. On a trip to the Nike Innovation Labs at the Oregon headquarters, we were treated to unprecedented access to some of the things the company’s development team was working on. One of the things I recall being wowed by was something that looked like a flexible circuit board of sensors that would fit into the sole of your shoe. Whereas the original Nike+ Training system relied on you putting in pod-like sensors, this would be built into the shoe, or the sole of a shoe.

Here’s another fact that might interest you. According to Statista, the global sports footwear market is projected to hit $87 billion by 2020. That’s a lot of shoes and football boots. In a world where even our bras have been connected, the big question I have is when the footwear market presents a huge opportunity, why are our shoes being neglected?

Source: http://www.wareable.com/running/smart-shoes-875