Last Updated on January 21, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org
For someone who is interested in walking mediation, there is not yet a satisfying solution. We have a white paper from Fellnr which deals very detailed with the Stryd, we have reviews from several sports sensor reviewers about several foot pods, we have found now a scientific paper about the Stryd:
But by experience, if we do not know the goal of the authors, we have to be critical. Is the paper from a group of sport physiologists who are looking for a degree, and the only goal they have is to write a scientific paper in a scientific journal which accepts almost all submitted papers?
If we are looking on the long term for a foot pod for scientific studies, an open source foot pod remains an interesting option:
which we can develop further, and do our own validation paper for our own scientific study. The costs for an open source foot pod are lower than for a Stryd. If we build it ourselves, and write a validation paper in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, we can start selling our own foot pod. And the better the study is, the more expensive the foot pod becomes. The example of the Dreem 2 headband shows, that a clinical study can increase the value of a device from 500 USD to 1400 USD. But we can’t develop a foot pod at the moment and sell it for 1500 USD, and we don’t have this goal.
But we promote the open source Wearable My Foot (WMF) as much as we can, and may the foot pod as Abiword or OpenBCI find interested developers who develop it further also in 10 or 20 years from now.