We all love a good pair of shoes. They're essential to our everyday lives. But when we think of shoes, technology isn't really something that comes to mind. Well, with smart shoes, fashion and tech meet in the middle. So, what are smart shoes, and can you buy them right now?
What Is A Smart Shoe?
Smart shoes might look like the type of shoe you'd see in any regular shop window, but they have a lot of cool features.
Firstly, smart shoes can be used to track your activity levels. With the help of a few small devices, these shoes can measure how active you are by monitoring how many steps you've taken, your pace, how many calories you've burned, and more. These shoes can even show you your location with the use of geo-location systems, such as GPS.
A lot goes into a smart shoe to give it the capabilities for such in-depth monitoring. For example, the shoe has a pressure sensor to detect when you have them on and your current weight. These pressure sensors are even being used to develop self-tying shoes that do themselves up once they detect your foot.
Smart shoes can also be fitted with environmental sensors that detect the atmosphere around you. These sensors can monitor light, sound, altitude, and more. Additionally, they have an internal sensor that monitors the shoe's battery life. Yes, these shoes use a battery to run, and you need to charge them to keep them going. However, they can last up to two weeks on a single charge, so this won't be too much of an inconvenience.
Some smart shoes also have some other little fun features, like LED lights on the soles that you can change the color of.
To show you your health data, smart shoes connect via Bluetooth to your phone. You'll most likely have an app designed to communicate with your smart shoes and provide a breakdown of your daily, weekly, or monthly stats. All in all, these shoes can do a lot and can offer some convenient perks for users.
Can I Buy A Pair of Smart Shoes?
Some companies have been founded with the sole purpose of manufacturing smart shoes, such as Digitsole. Digitsole provides smart shoes and insoles that can track several different health factors, including posture, steps taken, and calories burned. But some well-known activewear companies are now taking the leap into the digital realm with their footwear.
Nike, a household name and world-leading clothing giant, released its first smart shoe back in 2016. But it wasn't exactly an all-encompassing smart shoe. The Nike HyperAdapt 1.0 shoes can lace themselves up automatically. The shoe uses sensors to detect when you have put them on and then tie themselves up while you sit back and relax. While these shoes are pretty cool, they don't have any of the monitoring or tracking features offered by other shoes.
Under Armour's HOVR Phantom shoes, on the other hand, offer a few more useful features. For example, these shoes can connect to an app on your phone called Map My Run. This app works with the shoes to show you your total steps and your pace. You can also find some useful training plans on the app if you're looking to get fit.
Will Smart Shoes Become The Norm?
It's hard to know if smart shoes will eventually take off and become mainstream. At the moment, smart shoes aren't exactly a market norm, and most people don't even know what they are! And given that these shoes can cost upward of a few hundred dollars, not everyone will be able to afford such a luxury.
On top of this, you can track many things monitored by smart shoes using free apps or far more affordable devices like pedometer watches. This might make smart shoes a little futile. While some smaller companies sell different kinds of smart shoes, like Cloudnova and Digitsole, smart shoes are currently a pretty unpopular technology.
Who Knows What The Future Holds for Smart Fashion?
With smart rings and smart belts already on the market, there's no knowing what'll come next in the merging world of fashion and technology. Smart shoes may indeed become popular accessories in the near future, given how convenient they seem, not to mention cool! But for now, we'll stick to our trusty go-to pair of sneakers.