New AI-enabled 'smart' shoes to boost your fitness regime

An Indian start-up has developed a range of fitness wearables, such as 'smart' shoes and bands, integrated with an artificial intelligence (AI) coach which can provide you a personalised dynamic feedback, based on your real-time performance and training. While a variety of fitness trackers and apps are available, most generate data that users are not able to appropriately interpret.

"Consumers usually are not experts in nutrition, fitness activity, sports and wellness and hence deciphering the data most wearables track becomes a challenge," a company official told PTI. "There are dietitians and fitness coach subscriptions available with a lot of fitness devices, but that is human as well as time-bound and means additional investment from the consumer," it said. The new wearables come with an interactive app that uses statistics and data captured from the connected devices to help make better training and running decisions. 

An AI coach gives dynamic audio feedback, based on users' real-time performance and training. A 24x7 text coaching and user interaction also guides and supports the user in eating healthier, getting more active, and building great lifestyle habits. Going beyond traditional tracking, the AI health coach records and analyses the data of the user. This data is broken down into movements classified into various forms of activity, along with automatic detection of sleep and its various stages and patterns.

"Till now, all activity trackers and wearables gave data. We are conspiring to change that by inferring this data and giving it meaning," said Arnav Kishore, CEO and founder of Boltt, a Delhi NCR-based start up. "With Boltt, the mission is to empower millions of users around the globe to take a leap towards a healthier lifestyle. With an ever-growing market for wearables and people taking fitness seriously, in India, there is an increased focus on how we consume what is sold in the name of 'fitness,'" said Aayushi Kishore, CMO and co-founder of the company.

"With a customised data analysis and meaningful insights garnered through Boltt, Indian audience will get the niche they are looking for regarding personalised health coaching," she said. The data also includes a module for nutrition, which a user can log into the mobile application with millions of items to choose from. Based on this data, the AI health coach provides a real time chat guidance, on the most relevant elements, depending on what time of the day, the user logs in.

By tracking daily activity through the day, the AI coach helps users can stay on track with their fitness goals. The "Central Intelligence" is built via complex integration of rules, algorithms and machine learning. The products will be unveiled on January 6 at CES, Las Vegas in the US and would be available for pre-order through the popular crowd-funding platform Kickstarter.