Verily’s New Smart Shoe Tracks Weight and Falls

CNBC reports that Google’s sister company Verily wants to make a smart shoe that can track weight and monitor falls. The company has allegedly been looking for partners to develop this shoe and bring it to market, but it’s very early in the process.

Fall detection, as in, automatically alerting people when you’ve “fallen and I can’t get up,” seems to have become an increasingly popular feature for wellness gadgets. The latest Apple Watch also boasts this feature. This makes sense due to the growing number of Baby Boomers and the very real risk of injury that falls pose. In fact, falls are the number one cause of injuries and deaths from injury for elderly Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and preventing falls truly could save lives.

Verily (formerly Google Life Sciences) is hardly the first company to look into smart shoes for this purpose. E-VONE makes “smart shoes” in 26 styles, all containing sensors that will notify someone when you fall. But both E-VONE and Verily and everyone else’s smart shoes will need to contend with the same problems: few people want to wear the same shoes every day, and many people don’t wear shoes indoors. But a smart shoe may be a simpler and more immediate alert tool than trying to get to a phone or activating a Medicalert bracelet.

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