Seeing a kid with tennis shoes is not anything new. Seeing kids with shoes that have GPS tracking devices built in, now that is rather new. Isaac Daniel, engineer turned entrepreneur, is bringing out just such a shoe, designed with safety in mind when he introduced the COMPASS Blue GPS Shoe.
The ideal, as far as I can tell, is that the shoe had a GPS gadget and Bluetooth built in. When coupled with a cell phone, the shoe can transmit positional information to a central location, which can then alert authorities as to the wearer's location. It sound good in theory, but I have to admit that I am a little confused.
First, it appears to require a cell phone to make the connection to the home base. But most cell phones already have a GPS chip in them, ruling out the need for the shoe. I checked out the videos on the product site (http://www.isaacdaniel.com/), and it appears that a button on the shoe sets off an emergency beacon of sorts.
But the Bluetooth version seems to have too many points of failure to be dependable, given all of the required components (shoe with a charge, cell phone on and linked, etc.). Great ideal, but make it a self contained solution in the shoe itself (think emergency battery pack, cell phone chip, GPS, and panic button) and I think that you may just have winner.
Athletic shoes, depending on the location and the actual type of footwear, may also be referred to as trainers (British English), sandshoes, gym boots or joggers (Australian English) running shoes, runners or gutties (Canadian English, Australian English, Hiberno-English), sneakers, tennis shoes (North American English, Australian English), gym shoes, tennies, sport shoes, sneaks, or takkies (South African English) and rubber shoes (Philippine English) canvers (Nigerian English).
source: wikipedia
