Erez Lieberman-Aiden, 30-year-old graduate student at MIT and Harvard invented a high-tech shoe insole to help older people manage their balance before a catastrophic fall occurs. This "iShoe" sneaker insoles track a person's balance patterns using digital sensors. The battery-powered footbeds transmit data to computers about a person's walking and standing stability.

Lieberman-Aiden said he was frustrated after his grandmother's death, but didn't know quite what to do about it. He started to invent this iShoe after his grandmother died in a fall he feels could have been prevented. He tried to prevent something similar from happening to other older people.

Lieberman-Aiden was among four students awarded a $30,000 prize in innovation from MIT on Wednesday. The Lemelson-MIT Collegiate Student Prize is given to inventive and entrepreneurial students from MIT, Caltech, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University of Illinois. Other winners helped develop affordable prosthetic arms, new diagnostic tests for cancer and other diseases, and new methods for storing hydrogen power.
The iShoe spits out balance data sets that can be interpreted by doctors, or potentially by patients themselves, he said. It uses a Bluetooth connection to transmit the info from a person's shoes to a computer. The invention is still in the research-and-development phase, but Lieberman-Aiden said he expects it to become a consumer product within a few years. He said he's working with a company to produce the device, and that other manufacturers are looking into the idea, too.
Aside from the iShoe Lieberman-Aiden also granted the award for his work with colleagues on developing new technology to create 3-D models of the human genome. He said in this 3-D models of the human genome the twisted genome looks pretty much like a pack of Ramen noodles.