Newhigh-tech shoes and insoles(鞋垫) have been developed that can help elderly, si-组卷网

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New high-tech shoes and insoles(鞋垫) have been developed that can help elderly, sick 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 (触觉的) and visual feedback 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.” Pressure sensors in the Path Feel insoles provide tactile feedback that shakes the wearer’s feet and informs them when it is touching the ground.

The Path Finder shoes are designed specifically for Parkinson’s patients who can’t walk smoothly. Lasers projected out of the shoes in a green line aim to provide visual clues to help the sufferer focus on putting one foot in front of the other.

According to the National Parkinson Foundation, 38 percent of people with Parkinson’s suffer from falls each year, while Age UK estimates one-in-ten people over the age of 65 fall over. The hope is that both the insoles and the shoes can help bring those numbers down.

Both products are currently in the testing stage, with several London universities conducting trials. Early tests have seen some users improved their walking by over 50 percent.

【小题1】How do the Path Feel insoles work?