Stridalyzer, a sensor-fitted insole that tracks your Running Form

Stridalyzer

While there are several tness-tracking devices in the market today for runners, none of them track fundamental aspects of form and running style, which most trainers say are the foundation of achieving better performance and staying injury-free. Stridalyzer, from an India-based startup ReTiSense, is hoping to change that.

Stridalyzer is a wearable sensor-tted insole placed inside running footwear. The sensors in the insole connect with it’s smartphone app, which through a combination of local and cloud-based processing, learns the runner’s running form, style and various pressure points, and provides real-time advice to the runner to help them run with the correct form. It is geared towards people who want to run right – whether they be someone who has been running multiple years and participates in Ultra-marathons, or someone who has just started running. It is one of the rst products that works on understanding the fundamentals behind a runner’s activity – the “how”, and not just the “what”.

Stridalyzer is the latest entry in the rapidly-growing market for wearable tness-tracking devices, which Gartner reports will grow at a YoY rate of about 40 percent, and will be a $30-$50 Billion market by 2017. However, while most of such devices focus in the wrist, Stridalyzer is focusing on the feet and the knees.

“Most tness trackers just provide a lot of statistics and data about your run. As a regular runner myself, I did not really understand how to use that data to improve my run” says Anshuman Singh, co- founder of ReTiSense. “Stridalyzer started with the goal and intention to help runners improve their form and running style, which can help keep you injury-free and guide you on how to improve performance”.

Stridalyzer uses patent-pending hardware and sensing technology, along with sophisticated bio-physical modeling of the human leg during running for its analytics, and claims it can provide real-time feedback while maintaining high accuracy. One of the most interesting aspects of the product is that it can estimate, analyze and alert about potential injuries to the knee. “Knee injuries account for about 42% of all running injuries, and so we were very serious about providing guidance to runners that can help them prevent knee injury”, says Singh, who himself has rst-hand knowledge of this due to his ACL injury in the knee.

The launch of Stridalyzer will oer a paradigm shift in training and practice sessions for athletes and sports enthusiasts. The industry will now have a novel way to track and analyse runner’s run style, body form, body pressures and forces, as well as performance metrics like ground contact time and stride length. Stridalyzer helps runners by simplifying these parameters into two fundamental metrics: PerfScoreTM , the measure of their overall performance in a run, and FormScoreTM, the measure of their running form and style (and hence the injury risk) over the run.

Furthermore, in the near future, Stridalyzer will also allow runners to be directly connected with a health or tness expert to oer prompt advice after looking over instant reports created by the app.

Founders, Anshuman Singh and Shuvadeep Sarkar, are both highly-experienced technologists – they have built ReTiSense into a pioneering Wearable devices company within six month of starting the company.

They have already raised an angel seed round of $45,000 from undisclosed strategic partners based in the US. ReTiSense will be ready to launch the Stridalyzer by March 2015. It is estimated to be priced at $120-$140. ReTiSense plans to launch a crowdfunding campaign in December to get user validation and feedback, and to raise funds to take the product through manufacturing and distribution.