The Gait-Driven Shoe: Designing Footwear With User Comfort in Mind

Effective footwear design requires a great deal of research. You must answer questions such as:

What purpose is the shoe intended to serve? Who will use it? How will it be used, and in what locations or situations? What aesthetic considerations do you need to take into account without sacrificing the function of the shoe’s structures? How will the shoe function in various environments, in rainy versus dry conditions, and in different types of media? What will happen if it is laced improperly? Where is the majority of support needed?

And so on.

When developing footwear, you can’t simply guess. You must use actual, verifiable, scientific data to create the best possible product… and create the best possible reputation for yourself. This allows you to design the best products that encourage clinicians, coaches, biomechanists, athletes, and regular people to choose your footwear.

To do that, you need to capture data from inside the shoe. It’s a challenge, that’s for sure. But it’s also the only way to design a gait-driven shoe that keeps user comfort in mind. To do that, you need the best gait analysis system on the market today.

Before discussing that, though, let’s quickly examine the goals, challenges, and how-tos of footwear design.

Goals When Designing Footwear

When designing footwear, your goals are myriad. They include:

• Optimization of comfort and utility;
• Protection of the foot and its hundreds of sub-structures;
• Relevance to the shoe’s intended use, from diabetic patients to athletes; and
• Popularity of aesthetics.

Such information is critical to designing a shoe that achieves its intended purpose rather than just looking good. That, in turn, means your products will garner (or maintain) a positive reputation, doctors and athletes will trust you for their footwear, and you will have continued opportunities to serve your audience in the future.

To create the best footwear designs, you need the best gait data on how people walk and move. This data matters greatly to the design of cushioning, arch support, sides, tops, soles, laces, and other shoe structures. Gathering such data requires a good system.

Of course, once you’ve designed the shoe, you need to test it to find out where the limitations and improvements needed for the prototype lie. That, again, requires a sound gait analysis system at your fingertips. Sadly, gait analysis tools that work aren’t as common as one might think.

Challenges of Effective, Timely Footwear Design

One of the biggest challenges in footwear design is measuring plantar pressure in lab-based environments that don’t effectively emulate real life. People don’t move similarly when confined to a treadmill or hooked to machines by wires. Where cables are involved, the same is true outside. The inability to capture good data can hamstring shoe designers and slow their process. The same goes for unreliable equipment and product design deficiencies.

A lagging process is counterproductive in other ways. Footwear is subject to trends. While orthopedic shoes are a little more forgiving, athletic shoes are very indebted to the styles of the day. This means you need to design shoes in short periods that match current sensibilities and protect the many delicate structures of the foot. That’s a big challenge; improper testing systems only get in your way.

If you want the best and most accurate data, you must take measurements when activity occurs outside the lab, free of hampering wires or other restrictions.

The right systems free you of unnecessary constraints and allow you to test your products where they will be used while preserving the highest standards and reliability in pressure mapping technologies.

Plantar Pressure Mapping for Footwear Manufacturers and Designers

You need plain and straightforward gait analysis and pressure mapping technology to design better shoes.

More specifically, you need a system designed to map stance and gait precisely using cutting-edge, sensor-based hardware and software. This allows you to take preliminary readings of what you’ll need in a shoe, design a prototype, measure its success, create another, and continue to iterate until you have the best possible product.

The question is: what does such a system look like?

Design a Gait-Driven Shoe With XSENSOR

So, you want to design a gait-driven shoe. XSENSOR is here to help with our Intelligent Insoles, a fully realized hardware + software solution that allows you to take real-time gait measurements and implement the resulting data in your designs. Whether you seek to serve the top-tier athlete or the average grandparent, the best shoes are based on accurate, comprehensive data. With it, you can:

• Evaluate gait, plantar pressure, and foot function reliably;
• Count on durable hardware and software that hold up over time;
• Avoid constant set-up and recalibration that slow you down and eat away at your bottom line;
• Gain precise insights into athletic activities;
• Understand injury and pathology more effectively;
• Use undetectable tools that don’t change how the client moves;
• Employ a game-changing system right out of the box;
• Display and compare multiple recordings side-by-side; and
• Generate summaries and reports that deepen your understanding of the foot’s movement and the individual’s overall gait.

Partner With XENSOR to Design Your Ideal Shoe Today

Ready to design your ideal shoe? It starts with collecting lab-quality data right in the field. With accurate high-speed and high-resolution data and imagery, you can measure plantar pressure and gait like never before. You are no longer restricted to guesswork or outdated measurement systems; now, you have the tools of the future at your fingertips.

Whether you design shoes for sports performance or simple, everyday human movement, XSENSOR is here to help. Our Intelligent Insoles put science first, enabling you to put trustworthy and popular design first.

Find out more about our gait and motion insoles today.