WIRED TO WELLNESS: A COMMUNICATION-ICT FRAMEWORK FOR SMART SHOE-BASED HEALTH MONITORING SYSTEMS

Wearable devices are changing how health is monitored outside the clinic, and footwear has emerged as one of the most promising places to put a sensor. This paper conceptualizes the smart shoe as a communication system rather than only a biomedical gadget: a system in which plantar sensors capture signals from the body, a wireless link carries them to a smartwatch, smartphone, or computer, and software presents them as health information that a wearer, caregiver, or clinician can act on. Anchored on Shannon and Weaver's (1949) Mathematical Theory of Communication, the paper maps the smart-shoe chain onto the model's information source, transmitter, channel, receiver, destination, and noise, and applies the model's three levels of communication problems, the technical, the semantic, and the effectiveness, to ask whether health signals are carried accurately, understood correctly, and acted on usefully. The paper draws on literature on smart insoles and socks, diabetic foot care, wrist-worn blood pressure estimation, human-machine interfaces, machine-to-machine communication, and connectivity and data protection in Nigeria and sub-Saharan Africa. It argues that the reliability of smart-shoe health information is a property of the whole communication chain, and that in resource-constrained settings the main sources of noise are often infrastructural and social rather than technical. The paper is conceptual and reports no new empirical data. It concludes with recommendations for researchers, developers, health practitioners, and policymakers