LECHAL Smart Insoles
Lechal Navigation and Fitness Tracking smart Insoles and Buckles to help you navigate hands-free without looking at your phone. The insoles use Haptic feedback which is simple vibration patterns to give you route notifications and double as an activity tracker to help track your fitness accurately.
- Navigate hands-free without looking at your phone, even when offline.
- Get detailed route guidance through simple vibrations and patterns.
- Track your fitness accurately by measuring steps taken, calories burnt, distance travelled and much more.
- Use Lechal Pods in trim to fit insoles or just lace up the buckle into your sneakers.
- Battery life of up to 15 days on a single charge.
- Sync data with Apple Health and/or Google fit app
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Phoenix –
If you are using these as an activity tracker, they may work very well for you. If however, you are using them for the GPS features the product is supposed to provide, you may be a disappointed.Setup is not hard at all. First you need to charge the inserts for a minimum of 2 hours (the part that vibrates that you put in the insoles or, if you have shoe laces, you can put them in the provided shoe lace inserts). Charging the inserts is easy and is done via a USB cable which is connected to a “box” that each insert slides into. Then you need to download an app on your phone as well as do a firmware update. The update took about three or four minutes and setting up the app only took a few minutes as well.Using the app you can track your activity and you can, theoretically, use the inserts to navigate from any destination you enter into the app. The app also lets you to set default “Home” and “Work” destinations. Unfortunately, the inserts did not work for me as they are intended to. While they are tracking activity, I can feel absolutely no GPS navigation from them even though I have the vibrate setting set to high (you can adjust the setting). No matter what we did or how many times we re-calibrated the inserts we could not get them to navigate for us. If one is using this to navigate a strange city, as the product page suggests, then that is going to be a huge problem since you won’t have any idea where to go unless you use the app to direct you, which it will do, but then you can do that with any GPS app and don’t necessarily need shoe inserts to do it which negates the need for the product.Another problem I had with these is the comfort level. I have chronic pain so my situation is a bit unique but I found these inserts to be very uncomfortable and I can’t use the shoelace option as my shoes don’t have laces. I could perhaps stand wearing them for an hour or so but anything more than that and my feet would be in absolute agony.Overall, the concept is great and if the product actually navigated properly I’d give this a full five stars. However, we spent hours trying to get the inserts to actually navigate and vibrate and no matter what we did they did not work. That issue, combined with the comfort problem, makes me feel that while this product has great potential the execution needs to be a bit more thought out. They should work on making the inserts a bit more comfortable or offering different styles (an arch support style for those who need it, extra cushioning such as a gel insert for those who need that, etc.) and they really need to work on making navigation more intuitive and something that will actually work. Other than that, as an activity tracker, they work just fine. Just don’t count on them to help you find your way to or from home.
Jminning –
Not worth the purchase
paradonym –
Addition after 2 days of usage: both work in a way now… It seems like that one of the vibration motors builds a connection to the other and works as a bridge to the phone for it… 95% of the time the vibrations to signal turns work – only one of them has sometimes a huge delay (described further down) now. For example: If you reach your goal both should vibrate following by a single vibration on the side of where the destination actually is – sometimes one of them (i use them for the right foot, but they’re easily changeable through the app) reacts about 10 or 20, sometimes even 40 seconds later.I’ll keep the three star rating… Having them both vibrate without delay is a vital function which at the time of writing (2018/09/04) isn’t really reliable while the phone is just 50cm/20ft away.- After initial problems setting it up (described below) the Lechal Pods now work most of the time… There are still delays here and there – even big delays of around a minute between smartphone and vibration – but on first street walks they had worked. – so +1 star of the initial 2 stars.But read on for my experience with the setup:First, let’s beginn with the pairing process of them both. You have to charge them at first, I charged them for about 3 hours.Then I looked on my smartphones Bluetooth to review if something “Lechal”y pops up at the bluetooth menu – “Lechal-QTR” popped up, as a device which wants to have a bluetooth pairing code (it isn’t 1234 or 0000)…So I downloaded the Lechal app – logged in using Google, and – they can’t find the Lechal Pods.Even if they are actually not connected the app now showed an update button – I expected it failing – the Lechal pods aren’t connected – and it did – about three times… Suddenly the fourth time I tapped that button the Lechal Pods vibrated and the status messages on the bottom described a firmware transfer…So they’re actually working?uhm – kinda, after the Firmware update which popped up from nothing after continuously trying they now are found by the app and can be connected.Opened the tutorial to get to know the direction vibrations – and the pods vibrated – for 4 or 5 direction commands in the tutorial.So I set one up in a shoe assuming they worked now – and got a bit confused:the one I already put into my shoe doesn’t vibrates anymore on the position checking options the app offers.So I switched them – and they sometimes vibrate and sometimes not. The left one which was just a few centimeters away from the phone worked, but the one in the shoe didn’t.Imagine your phone on the height of your knees while you sit – and it seemingly can’t reach the Pod on the floor anymore…I tapped some of the buttons to test the right and left – and after around 30 seconds the left Pod vibrated… – and again… – while the other one was completely silent.The left one kept vibrating a few times more, but that delayed that I can’t assign a tutorial step to them…Now they’re connected somehow, I can review the battery status in the app – but everytime they should vibrate they are completely silent.I don’t know what causes that delays up to 40 seconds, I have another fitness tracker wristband and in the area about 5 or 6 smartphones and two bluetooth headphones (from other people) can be found. So bluetooth is pretty heavy in the region.I’d not suggest taking them out in the streets just yet when you depend on their vibrations, For this I guess the connection has been too unstable at my side. Yes, I know that Navigation is Beta (they warn in the app that this function is still beta) but the basic bluetooth connection is something which has to work.I may refund them in the coming days if the basic vibration features doesn’t get to function with less delay – I might walk about one or two junctions in that time. but I think all of that can be done better using firmware updates and app updates. The basic thing they have to do is to vibrate the moment the Smartphone wants them to vibrate – and if they don’t do that they’re pretty useless, especially for 60 dollars.The concept is nice and has nearly no competitors – but the device has a long journey in front of it until it can be used – especially by visually impaired people Ducere (or Lechal wants them to use…Edit: after a bit rest they now somehow work with less delay. I’ll test them the coming days and will edit here if possible.I’d suggest Lechal to make the devices pairable by the user using the phones bluetooth menu, that way the somewhat difficult process to pair I described above would be a bit easier…