The Story Behind the First Smart Shoe – PUMA's RS Computer Shoe

In the early 1980s, PUMA owner Armin Dassler challenged his sports science advisor Dr. Peter Cavanagh to create something that would make his sneaker company a true technology leader. Dr. Cavanagh's idea was to turn the shoe into a computer. Tech Briefs caught up with Dr. Cavanagh to talk about the past and future of wearable technology. PUMA's current Global Director of Innovation Charles Johnson also told Tech Briefs, “In order to know the future you need to know your past.”

Today's wearables are being used to collect unprecedented amounts of data. We explore what's being done with this data in this episode of Here’s an Idea, featuring Dr. Cavanagh, former NFL player Chris Borland, former NFL coach John Shoop, and ESPN writer Greg Wyshynski. Listen to the episode and learn more here.

Listen to more Here's an Idea episodes and subscribe to the podcast here. 

Transcript

00:00:00 [Music] with the latest in computer and it was the 80s Fitness was the trend new electronic technologies were becoming more and more part of everyday life our CEO at the time armand Osler he was the son of founder rudy dostler he knew that advanced science and technology would one day make a big difference in the

00:00:28 sports industry his idea was to bring the research that was being done at puma directly to runners he thought the best way to do that was to link a puma shoe to a computer and he knew exactly who could do that Armand really motivated me and said look you've got all this science and it's out there in the lab why don't you put your thinking cap on and let's see if we can link one of our

00:00:55 shoes into a computer at the time we had an industry guru on staff dr. Peter Cavanaugh and he ran the Puma running studio that's the place where sport research was used to create better running shoes and actually better runners when you go for a run you would come back and you would plug the shoe into your computer it would download the information compare it with your

00:01:20 calibration data and log it into your personal track again this is the very first prototype we made we just put a little plexiglass box on the back of this and all the electronics it was directly wired in there they were integrated circuits there's a little LED on the back the software for the shoe was contained on a floppy disk so users could take the program off this disk and

00:01:48 load it on their computer we tested this out and it seemed to work extremely well at the time it was a technology that nobody thought they needed the reaction to the shoe was why on earth would you want something that tells you how far you've run how fast you've run how long you've been exercising why would you want to do this all of these people now are facing

00:02:17 millions of people who are obsessed with how far how fast how many calories for me it was my first inkling that some form of body mounted sensors was the future for tracking people's running mechanics a lot has changed since the invention of the RS computer chip we will very proud of our technology we bursted for example that the shoe was going to have a gate array with 600

00:02:54 transistors on a square inch well it turns out that there are 2 billion transistors in an iphone we were using an apple 2e computer with 68k of ram my macbook has got 20,000 times more storage still it was a revolution that we think should not be forgotten so we decided to reissue it well the original shoe could connect to a Commodore 64 or an Apple 2e

00:03:27 with a cable we traded out the cable connection for Bluetooth optimized the circuit board we added a more powerful battery and then we created a smartphone app to process the data but we made sure to keep the look of the 80s and we had an 8-bit game looks like it came right out of the 80s so it's not just about performance anymore it's also about fun [Music]