An electric bike for your feet? Nike says ‘we just did it’ with shoe built for average runners

Nike is launching a powered shoe that will help everyday runners and walkers go further with less effort.

Dubbed “Project Amplify,” Nike said in a statement that their shoe is designed to “augment natural lower leg and ankle movement”.

The shoe has a light-weight motor, drive belt and a rechargeable cuff battery that fits within a carbon fibre-plated shoe that can be worn with or without the system, the statement said.

The shoe will eventually give people an “unparalleled boost” to the future of running, jogging and walking.

The shoe is “it’s intended to serve athletes who want to go faster and farther with less effort” by giving them “a second set of calf muscles,” Nike said.

The company says more than 400 athletes covered 2.4 million steps in more than nine different versions of Project Amplify around a track in their Nike Sport Research Lab (NSRL). The shoe is still in the testing phase and is expected to launch “in the coming years”.

Euronews Next reached out to Nike to see whether there is a timeframe for the shoe’s release, but did not receive an immediate reply.

Who else is building enhanced footwear?

Nike isn’t the only company working on robotised shoes.

Dephy, a bionic footwear brand and Nike’s partner in Project Amplify, said it is getting ready to launch a “bionic footwear system” called the Sidekick, a powered ankle wearable device that gives people the ability to “walk further and faster with less fatigue”.

In 2023, Pittsburgh-based company Shift Robotics launched the “Moonwalker shoe,” a rechargeable artificial intelligence-powered shoe with eight wheels that adapts to the way the user walks, their weight and the terrain they are taking on.

In Switzerland, a team of engineers at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) created a shoe that harvests the user’s kinetic energy and passes it through a piezoelectric generator that converts it into an electric charge.

The team behind the intelligent shoe say that enough energy is harvested by this system for it to be fully operational without a battery. The shoes also collect data about the person wearing them, which is sent via Bluetooth to the user’s phone.

Other robotics companies, such as ReWalk Robotics, are creating robotic exoskeleton systems, including shoes, that help those who cannot walk.