Did you remember to recharge your shoes?

Self-lacing shoes can do much more than keeping off the burden of lacing… and they hint to a future of body monitoring. Image credit: Nike

Nike has announced the first pair of shoes, sneaker, that are self-lacing. The Adapt BB, that’s their provisional name (usually Nike likes to name their top of the lines shoes after a top player…), is the result of a 3 year intensive research and are manufactured in an electronic factory. Nike told that one of the challenges it had to face was to teach electronic engineers how to manufacture shoes. All in all, however, it seems it was easier than teaching shoe maker how to manufacture chips, sensors and communication devices.

What has impressed me most was that Nike is seeing this sneaker as a communication device, not as a shoe with communication capability of a sort.

First thing first.

Adapt BB is the result of an idea, turned into a prototype some years ago, a shoe with sensors that can feel what is going on and a way to communicate the data to a smartphone. The problem with the prototype was that it was heavy, unreliable and quite expensive. Not exactly the characteristics leading to win the market.

Three years of industrial research, well reported into a Wired article -a must read to understand the effort it takes to transform a prototype into an industrial product- have delivered a sneaker that is still on the expensive side but within the budget of several “geeky” runners. The Adapt BB weight just one pound (less than half a kg), lighter than other sneakers, and is now very reliable. The testing has involved some 2,900 lacing cycles, 30,000 impact pulses with a 780 pound force (350kg), 300 miles (450+km) of running and 5,000 cycles of left to right flexing. In the process it has been doused with 80 gallons (300+litre) of water and the activation buttons pressed 40,000 times.

Each shoe contains a motor controlled by software (a computer chip in the shoe) to automatically lace the sneaker. Each shoe is autonomous and has sensors all around to assess the tightness and 3 pre-programmed levels that one can finely tune, individually to each shoe, using an app on the smartphone. The communication is managed by a Bluetooth chip inside the shoe. Of course all this electronics needs juice to work, and Nike is delivering a mat to wirelessly recharge the shoe once you are finished running and jumping.

The sneaker is paired with a smartphone app providing all sort of data about the activity and your body. Image credit: Nike

The many sensors contained in the shoes provide data to the application in the smartphone. Nike points out that the data provided by the shoes are much more accurate than the ones you can get from wearing a smartwatch. The data can also be used to analyse the way your feet hit the ground, their position during the run and the app can give advice on bettering your stride.

There are many points that are worth noting here:

  • electronics has become so affordable and reliable that can be embedded in everyday items that one would have never imagined would need it;
  • by embedding electronics in what just last year would have been considered useless “upgrading” it is actually creating a platform for applications to harvest and make sense of data;
  • the smartphone is the “de-facto” controller, the open platform supporting third parties application and the intelligence hub;
  • everyday objects are becoming monitoring devices that can be leveraged for pro-active healthcare;
  • technology is available to create whatever whim you can have, however it takes a lot of industrial research and effort to make a viable, affordable, product.

About Roberto Saracco

Roberto Saracco fell in love with technology and its implications long time ago. His background is in math and computer science. Until April 2017 he led the EIT Digital Italian Node and then was head of the Industrial Doctoral School of EIT Digital up to September 2018. Previously, up to December 2011 he was the Director of the Telecom Italia Future Centre in Venice, looking at the interplay of technology evolution, economics and society. At the turn of the century he led a World Bank-Infodev project to stimulate entrepreneurship in Latin America. He is a senior member of IEEE where he leads the New Initiative Committee and co-chairs the Digital Reality Initiative. He is a member of the IEEE in 2050 Ad Hoc Committee. He teaches a Master course on Technology Forecasting and Market impact at the University of Trento. He has published over 100 papers in journals and magazines and 14 books.

2 comments

  1. Roberto, this is a basketball shoe. BB stands for basketball.

    • Absolutely correct!
      Not sure what the comment is referring to, though. May be my use of the word “sneaker” is not appropriate for BB – BasketBall- shoes? In that case I am misguided by its use in Italian… where sneakers also include BB shoes.