A Dream of a More Connected Foot Health System

If money were no obstacle and you didn't have to worry about regulation, licenses, abilities, and everything else that gets in the way of people building and creating their ideas, I would create a holistic foot-to-footwear framework. It would be a connected foot health system.

The big picture would be personalized foot rehab to footwear production to footwear creation and selection. I would start with collegiate athletes, specifically women rugby players, then move to women basketball players and then branch out. My priority would be to determine where each athlete is strong or weak in their feet, gait, and overall mechanics, then develop a plan for improvement. Additionally, based on that information, we would develop footwear that would move with them from each stage as they improve and get better. We would remove the need to rely on overgeneralized products and information to deal with personal differences. Our effort would be to increase personalization to reduce the risk of injury while increasing overall performance and health. My dream would be that we are creating an environment that leads to the development of a habit that promotes care, consideration, and investment in the prioritization of the lower extremities to increase the mobility and longevity of people. I would desire for all of us to be more proactive in our foot health.

I believe right now that everything is extremely segmented. There is no flow between prevention, rehab, footwear, activity, exercise, etc. Everything seems to be a siloed decision that is reliant on human reactivity to a need and an issue. Every aspect has so much friction in the application and the transition. No one really thinks of their mechanics or feet until there is an injury, and many people outside athletes seem to care about recovery only until everything is back to being good enough. Why?

Well, after injury is rehab, and for rehab, you need knowledge and direction, which mostly comes from a physical therapist, your doctor, or someone in the medical field. But what do you have to do to get to them? Follow through, call them, schedule the appointment, and who knows when you can get in. Then you actually have to do the work, all while going about your daily life and accommodating for your change in the same footwear and behavior, generally, that hasn't changed. So far, we have:

Injury - friction

Rehab - friction

Life - friction

And here is the thing. When you get injured, do the doctors or staff come with you to rehab? Do the rehab people come with you home to make sure you stay on your rehab schedule? Does anyone shop with you when you need new shoes?

I mean, look at athletes at the collegiate level, and this may be different from school to school and division to division, but before they play, everyone has to do a physical. In that, do we go through it in a proactive way to say these are your strengths and your weaknesses, and this is a proactive plan to get you to be better and at your best? Or do we say they are good to play and allow the training to begin and then reactively create a plan?

My obsession is feet and footwear, and I think feet are more overlooked than they need to be.