We are moving towards an era of the Internet of things, and almost every smart device looks good and beneficial. However, these smart socks are one of the most absurd things that have come out of the era.
Surprisingly, they are not even new as a Swiss sock manufacturing company named BlackSocks has been producing smart socks which communicate with the owner through a smartphone application since 2012. For something as simple as socks, smartness sounds crazy, but aren’t we all tired of losing one sock of the pair all the time?
The system uses Radio Frequency Identification chips on the socks, and a handheld device decodes the chips. The socks even come with a dedicated smartphone application. We know that all this technology is too complicated for the simple task of sorting socks. But you are going to love it when you don’t have to struggle for matching your socks all the time.
The smarter socks come with a pair of RFID chips containing the pair’s unique ID and all other information about the socks. A wireless reader called the “Sock Sorter” decodes the information on the RFID chip. Once paired with the smartphone, you can take the Sock Sorter close to the sock, and it will read the RFID information and display it on your smartphone application so you can pair your socks.
The RFID contains much more information than just the ID; it tells you if your sock belongs to the left or the right foot, the date it was manufactured and the date you bought the pair. Every time you pair two socks, the app remembers it as a wash period. So the RFID attached to your socks is a little CV telling everything about its life cycle.
The best part is not even the pair keeping; the app even lets you join socks from different pairs into one new pair if one gets damaged or lost.
The socks are made of 81% Peruvian Pima cotton, 18% polyamide and 1% LYCRA® fiber. The company has been making and selling these socks since 2012, but they have not been popular for obvious reasons. Ten pairs of the Smarter Socks will cost you 189 bucks. Too expensive, right? The company has received a lot of criticism, but they never let it get their hopes down.
Would you like to buy the smart socks? Or would you prefer staying with the regular ones? Comment below!
