Skip to main content

Digitsole’s A.I.-powered insoles strive to improve your cycling performance

Image used with permission by copyright holder

Improving your cycling game doesn’t have to involve buying a new bike or investing in an expensive power meter — instead, you might consider starting from the bottom. This week, Digitsole, the French-based connected footwear technology company, unveiled the world’s first artificial intelligence-powered smart insoles for cycling. Meet the Run Profiler Cycling insoles, a simple insert that cyclists can place in their shoes and use to help better their performance, manage their fatigue levels, and strengthen their muscles. With the insole, they will be able to receive personalized insights into their cycling habits, and just maybe, learn how to kick things up a notch.

“With the launch of these A.I.-Powered Cycling insoles, Digitsole is reinventing footwear in cycling by designing products and solutions at affordable prices that really help people,” Karim Oumnia, CEO of Digitsole, said in a statement. Currently, the executive continued, there is little on the market that can provide cyclists with the breadth and depth of information given by the Run Profiler Cycling insoles. “Cyclists need to spend a huge amount in a laboratory study to get such technical information about this pedaling technique,” she added. But these insoles claim to offer quite a bit of insight at a relatively low price.

First off, the insoles offer pedaling technique analysis (PTA), including pedaling angle, pedaling balance, and push and pull efficiency. Then, there is also the activity tracking component, because why put an additional tracker on your wrist when you can just pull on your favorite pair of cycling shoes? The insoles track your cadence, power gain and loss, elevation, as well as speed. The insoles additionally offer personalized guidelines based on your pedaling and will suggest the ideal seat height, frame height, and length of the handlebar. Thanks to the A.I. component, the insoles can track your fatigue level and alert you to any risk of injury.

As you ride, the connected app will provide audio coaching to guide you through your activity and once you’re ready to cool down, you receive an analytic summary of your activity. Ultimately, these insoles hope to encourage a more efficient pedaling technique, which means achieving more power by exerting less energy. And with A.I. technology, you may just be able to improve your performance, manage your fatigue, and strengthen your muscles.

Editors' Recommendations

Lulu Chang
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Fascinated by the effects of technology on human interaction, Lulu believes that if her parents can use your new app…
The BigSleep A.I. is like Google Image Search for pictures that don’t exist yet
Eternity

In case you’re wondering, the picture above is "an intricate drawing of eternity." But it’s not the work of a human artist; it’s the creation of BigSleep, the latest amazing example of generative artificial intelligence (A.I.) in action.

A bit like a visual version of text-generating A.I. model GPT-3, BigSleep is capable of taking any text prompt and visualizing an image to fit the words. That could be something esoteric like eternity, or it could be a bowl of cherries, or a beautiful house (the latter of which can be seen below.) Think of it like a Google Images search -- only for pictures that have never previously existed.
How BigSleep works
“At a high level, BigSleep works by combining two neural networks: BigGAN and CLIP,” Ryan Murdock, BigSleep’s 23-year-old creator, a student studying cognitive neuroscience at the University of Utah, told Digital Trends.

Read more
Clever new A.I. system promises to train your dog while you’re away from home
finding rover facial recognition app dog face big eyes

One of the few good things about lockdown and working from home has been having more time to spend with pets. But when the world returns to normal, people are going to go back to the office, and in some cases that means leaving dogs at home for a large part of the day, hopefully with someone coming into your house to let them out at the midday point.

What if it was possible for an A.I. device, like a next-generation Amazon Echo, to give your pooch a dog-training class while you were away? That’s the basis for a project carried out by researchers at Colorado State University. Initially spotted by Chris Stokel-Walker, author of YouTubers:How YouTube Shook Up TV and Created a New Generation of Stars, and reported by New Scientist, the work involves a prototype device that’s able to give out canine commands, check to see if they’re being obeyed, and then provide a treat as a reward when they are.

Read more
New A.I. hearing aid learns your listening preferences and makes adjustments
Widex Moment hearing aids.

One of the picks for this year’s CES 2021 Innovation Awards is a smart hearing aid that uses artificial intelligence to improve the audio experience in a couple of crucial ways.

Among the improvements the Widex Moment makes to conventional hearing aids is reducing the standard sound delay experienced by wearers from 7 to 10 milliseconds seconds down to just 0.5 milliseconds. This results in a more natural sound experience for users, rather than the out-of-sync audio experience people have had to settle for up until now.

Read more