Nurvv SMART Running insoles

Nurvv SMART Running insoles are making the news today at CES. I see ‘smart’ running insoles about once a year, so here we have 2020’s version and it’s handy as some of the founders seem to be based just up the road from me so I’d better be nice.

Without yet seeing the NURVV insoles, my worries are severalfold, namely

• Durability – whilst these KINDS of devices are always theoretically built to take a pounding they don’t, historically, seem to be designed to take a pounding WHILST twisting and whilst be carelessly switched from shoe-to-shoe or thrown in kit bags.
• The market – is there actually a significant MASS-market for technique coaching? These products tend not to sell for a reason. Having said that, SHFT  did sell reasonably well but the owners still haven’t bought that elusive tropical island. I even suspect that most of us over-estimate the market for regular digital sports coaching (ie simple running plans excluding technique coaching)
• Connectivity – historically these products (and many other new products too), expect you to suddenly change how you train and centre your life around their product. It ain’t gonna happen folks…at least not in great numbers. If you’ve used the Nike running app or a Garmin Forerunner for the last 5 years I suspect that you want to integrate any new technology into your current app/watch.

Having said all of that, NURVV does look like an interesting offering that also bolts on the training load piece to the running technique piece on the APPLE watch platform. Audio feedback works too and, like previous offerings, the makers are claiming extremely high-frequency sampling rates of the footstrike and so they might well be able to introduce a new level of accuracy.