by James Badham
The summer 2024 issue of the magazine Convergence, produced in The Robert Mehrabian College of Engineering at UC Santa Barbara, included an article about Cadense, a company developed by Tyler Susko, associate teaching professor, undergraduate vice chair, and capstone instructor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at UCSB. He had spent nearly a decade working — eventually with UCSB mechanical engineering associate professor Elliott Hawkes — to develop an adaptive shoe and build a startup company around it. The intention? To help the millions of people in the United States who experience foot drop, an inability when walking to avoid scuffing the ground when bringing one foot forward through the air to take the next step.
Susko and Elliott refer to their invention as a “variable friction shoe,” a reference to the fact that the sole contains both high-friction and low-friction components. When the foot is moving forward during the “swing phase” of walking, the low-friction component is elevated from the sole, so that if the foot contacts the ground, the shoe will slide forward rather than stopping, which can lead to trips and falls. Once the foot reconnects with the ground as the step is completed and the weight shifts to that foot, then the low-friction surface retracts, exposing the high-friction surface, which provides a stable, non-slip landing for the “stance phase” of the step, when the foot is on the ground.
