Let your feet do the talking…and charging

A group of mechanical engineering students in America have designed a pair of shoes that generate enough electricity while you walk to power a mobile phone.

The current prototype has a lever protruding from the back of the shoe and every footstep powers a motor that sends energy through wires to a belt-mounted battery pack – enough to power a charge the battery of a phone or MP3 player.

Walking is healthy, sociable and environmentally-friendly, but the number of journeys taken on foot is at its lowest level for over a decade. Only around four in ten of us walk for 20 minutes three times or more.

There is no evidence to suggest that people are swapping walking for other types of healthy activity like cycling so it’s hard to imagine what can be done to halt the decline. Technology is argualbly part of the problem rather than the solution where lack of exercise is concerned, but that hasn’t stopped Google from developing talking shoes. Your walking and running habits are uploaded to the internet and the footwear will let you know if you're not being active enough.

By connecting a pair of sneakers to the web, we’re creating unique opportunities between physical objects and digital ad spaces. Every move the user makes generates data that’s captured using an accelerometer, gyroscope and pressure sensors. That data then gets pushed to a web app on your mobile phone and translated in real-time into funny and motivating commentary. That commentary then gets pushed to banners and social media, creating new, interesting content in the digital world from something happening live in the physical one.