PROJECT
StrideSense — smart insole
A wearable biomechanical sensor that reads gait from inside the shoe.
An embedded wearable that measures pressure and motion from inside a shoe to build a picture of how someone walks. It is the flagship of my move from finance into the hardware/software intersection: real firmware, real sensors, real people to test with.
Problem
Gait tells you a lot — rehab progress, fatigue, asymmetry, load — but capturing it usually means a lab, a force plate, or a motion-capture rig. I wanted the signal to live where the foot actually is: in the insole.
Approach
- Sensing. Pressure (force-sensitive resistors) across key contact zones, plus an IMU for orientation and motion.
- MCU. Running on a Seeed XIAO nRF52840 Sense. It started on an Arduino board; I moved to the nRF52840 for its size, onboard sensing, and BLE.
- Build space. Prototyped and tested at the robotics club at Artisan’s Asylum in Somerville, which gave me a bench, tools, and people to sanity-check ideas against.
- Discovery. Alongside the hardware I ran structured customer-discovery conversations to find who actually needs this.
Materials grant
Artisan’s Asylum provided a materials grant in June 2026 that covered components for the build.
What’s still open
I do not yet have a committed beachhead customer. That is the honest state of the project — an open question I am actively working, not something to paper over. The leading candidates and the discovery notes are:
TODO(JP): summarize the beachhead segments you’ve talked to (e.g. running clinics, PT, footwear) and where each conversation landed.
What broke / what I learned
TODO(JP): add 2–3 concrete failures and fixes (sensor drift, mounting, power, BLE throughput, mechanical durability in the insole, etc.).
Next
TODO(JP): the next milestone — e.g. “a wearable session that logs a full day” or “a pilot with N testers.” Keep it specific.