Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. Legacy Archives

3L Labs puts a fitness tracker in your shoe

Add as a preferred source on Google

CES is yet to officially get underway, but various product previews and announcements are already filtering out. One of the more interesting early titbits to come out of Las Vegas is the Footlogger from 3L Labs: this fitness tracker fits inside your shoe rather than around your wrist, and could potentially help spot health problems early as well as monitor your daily jog.

Head over to the product’s rather antiquated official website for more details on the Footlogger, which incorporates a three-axis accelerometer and eight different pressure sensors. With a memory capacity of 50,000 footprints, wireless Bluetooth capabilities and a 24-hour battery life between charges, the gadget could tempt anyone looking to get a better idea of their exercise habits.

Recommended Videos

According to 3L Labs, the Footlogger will be able to record your running and walking speeds, a history of your daily movements and how many calories you’re burning as well as the number of steps you’re getting through. The company also claims its tracker can be used to measure weight distribution, so athletes could use it improve their technique, for example.

Other potential applications for the device include helping with patient rehabilitation (after spinal or nervous system injuries) or even spotting the early signs of arthritis and dementia. Eventually, you might also be able to use the Footlogger to control your favorite video game, be it a futuristic first-person shooter or an Olympics simulation.

At the end of the day you’ll be able to place your sneakers on a wireless charger. Data pulled from your activities will be crunched by 3L Labs and could be returned to you (or your coach) via SMS text or a smartphone app. As yet we have no details on pricing or a launch date, but presumably we’ll be hearing more from 3L Labs at CES — stay tuned to Digital Trends for all the CES 2014 news stories and product announcements as they happen.

David Nield
Former Contributor
Dave is a freelance journalist from Manchester in the north-west of England. He's been writing about technology since the…
Spotify apparently has no solid plan to label AI-generated music
spotify

There's a quiet anxiety spreading through music streaming — and Spotify, the platform more than half a billion people trust to soundtrack their lives, is doing remarkably little about it. AI-generated tracks are flooding streaming platforms at a pace that would've felt dystopian five years ago. Tens of thousands of them, every single day, slipping into the same playlists and recommendation queues as your favorite human artists. And most listeners wouldn't even know the difference — research suggests the overwhelming majority can't tell them apart in a blind listen.

Listeners are already solving it themselves

Read more
Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy Glasses have leaked, and the looks don’t impress
Because in the smart glasses market, the ones people actually wear every day are the ones that don't make them feel like they're wearing a science experiment.
Viture One smart glasses atop MacBook Air.

Samsung’s purported smart glasses are no longer a rumor. Android Headlines appears to have published the first renders of the Galaxy Glasses, and if you were expecting something that looked like the future, get ready to be disappointed. 

As seen in the pictures, the Galaxy Glasses have a familiar, rounded sunglasses-style look that’s strikingly similar to the Meta Ray-Bans, which have been on the market for a couple of years now. The “Samsung” branding is there on one of the temple arms, but beyond that, there’s hardly a unique design element that tells them apart. 

Read more
Meta’s latest outrageous deal is getting solar power beamed even at night from satellites
Meta's deal with Overview Energy isn't just about clean power. It's a preview of what keeping AI running sustainably at planetary scale is going to require.
Satellite by Starlink

Out of all the things Meta has ever been accused of, thinking small hasn’t been one of them. 

The company that owns the most popular social media and messaging platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp, is now looking at beaming sunlight from space to the Earth’s surface for powering its AI data centers after dark (via TechCrunch). 

Read more