Smart soccer shoe

In this paper we present a smart soccer shoe that uses textile pressure sensing matrices to detect and analyze the interaction between players' foot and the ball. We describe the sensor system that consists of two 3 × 4 and one 3 × 3 matrices sampled at over 500Hz with low power electronics that allows continuous operation (incl. wireless transmission) for 8 hours using a small 800mA/h Li-Po battery. We show how relevant parameters for shot analysis such as contact speed and contact angles can be reliably derived from the sensor signals. To ensure reliable ground truth we evaluated the system with a kick robot in the adidas testing facility, which is the standard approach used by adidas to systematically and quantitatively test new shoes and balls. The test encompasses 17 different types of shots and achieves a near 100% classification accuracy/F-score. The system endured extreme levels of impact resulting in over 100km/hr ball speed.