New high-tech shoes and insoles have been developed that can help elderly, ill and disabled people walk without fear of falling over.
Unveiled at the Wearable Technology Show in London on Tuesday, the Path Feel insoles and Path Finder shoes from U.K. startup Walk With Path provide tactile feedback and visual cues to assist walking.
“If you walk and you don’t have a good feeling of the ground, you’ve got to be very careful, you keep checking every step, you need to look at the ground and see how you put your leg on the ground,” Iddo Wald, a design engineer at Walk With Path, tells Newsweek. “Path gives the confidence needed to walk without falling.
“We had a patient who suffers from a spinal cord injury and actually had no feeling of the ground at all but he could feel the vibration. It’s really exciting.”
The intelligent insoles and shoes are designed to assist people who suffer from peripheral neuropathy—a condition brought about by a wide range of diseases, including diabetes, multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s Disease.
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By ANTHONY CUTHBERTSON, Newsweek, SouthFloridaReporter.com, Mar. 22, 2016
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