While the bulk of wearable technology has so far focused on wristwear, a company from India wants to get to the heart and sole of fitness tracking through a new pair of wearable trainers.

Ducere – the company behind the Lechal trainers – hopes to be the very first interactive haptic feedback footwear business in the world, with co-founder Krispian Lawrence reportedly targeting a September 2014 release date, claiming to already have 25,000 pre-orders.

The shoes are built with bluetooth-enabled insoles that can connect to a smartphone and provide user-feedback through insole vibrations. The shoes can be connected to Google Maps, enabling directions to be disseminated without the need to look at a screen – handy while running along busy streets – while the usual pedometer/calorie counter is also present.

The concept of smart shoes has been around for a while. Google advertised a wise-cracking smart shoe in March 2013 (see video below), although little has been heard of it since. The creators of Lechal say they were initially developing a shoe designed for the visually-impaired before later realising that the concept had broader applications.

With the initial wave of wearables almost exclusively focusing on wristbands and, more recently, smartwatches, it will be interesting to observe whether the growth of the market sparks a new range of products designed for different areas of the body. A current kickstarter campaign for a tech start-up called FreeWavz is bidding to raise funds for a fitness tracker that can be embedded in wireless headphones.

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