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Comment by thecleaner | Hacker News Reader

> shoes that tell you: stop landing on your heels so hard.

This might happen quite quickly. Thing is how you walk and how much you abuse your legs can be a major source of problems like shot knees in the long run. And these things creep, they don't just happen quickly so you can't remedy it so fast.

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Already exists. I managed a project for a well-known company in the sneaker industry that sends gait & foot pressure data from the shoe to an app and they have been working on this for probably close to a decade at this point. I can only assume that they've decided that commercialization outside the niche of Olympic athletes isn't worthwhile.

And they are definitely not the only player since I recall writing some similar code for another organization in that field.

I remember when I played football (like 5 years ago) there were ads in the stores for cleats with chips in it for a lot of tracking, we didn't buy them because we didn't know how to use them so I don't know how they actually worked but the marketing was there (and I suspect the actual product too)

I spent the last half-decade or so in the electronics & software end of the fitness industry and I think there are a lot of niches like this. On the one hand you have the massive market for wrist & chest strap Heart Rate Monitors, and the speed/power meters in stationary bikes. On the other there are many much smaller markets that need a particular type of fitness data that doesn't get a whole lot of external exposure.

Getting the data isn't the hard part; knowing how to make it useful is.

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