March 23, 2009
An Australian computer scientist has developed a mobile phone housed in a shoe.
Paul Gardner-Stephen got the idea from 1960s TV spy spoof Get Smart in which bumbling agent Maxwell Smart used a shoe phone.
He says the gadget has aroused so much interest among the geek crowd that he's considering selling it online.
Mr Gardner-Stephen, 32, a post-doctoral fellow in bioinformatics at Adelaide's Flinders University, made the gadget as a prop for a church camp drama presentation that had a Get Smart theme.
He got a cobbler friend to embed a Motorola handset in the heel of one shoe and a Bluetooth headset in the other.
"It's surprising, your first thought is it's completely impractical, but it's actually not that bad - the phone rings, you slip off the shoe, you open the heel and press the button and you're talking in around the same time it would take to fumble in a bag and pull the phone out," he said.
Mr Gardner-Stephen used the gadget as his main phone for three days and described the experience as "quite good fun", except when he had to pick up a call while driving.
"I've had a couple of bemused looks, but it turns out that universities are quite resilient to the unusual - I've walked several hundred metres outside on campus talking into the shoe and no one's really paid any attention," he said.
He is now exploring practical uses for his invention such as monitoring care of the elderly. He reckons it could be used to measure pulse, blood pressure and other medical information.
