A Second Look at Walk With Path's EIC Accelerator Smart Insoles

People with diabetic or age-related neuropathy lose feeling in the soles of their feet, and with it much of their sense of where the ground is. Walk With Path, a small Danish-British company founded by the designer Lise Pape, set out to give that feeling back with an insole that vibrates when the foot lands. In the European Innovation Council's 5 June 2019 cut-off, the last rounds still run as the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the company was selected for a grant-only award for Path Feel, listed in the Commission's list of winners as "Walk With Path" of Copenhagen. No other company is named for the project.

The grant agreement was signed on 29 October 2019. The EU contribution was €2,293,900 towards a total cost of €3,277,000, according to CORDIS. The promise in the project summary was plain: finish the prototype, validate it, certify it, and introduce it to the market after the project ended. The insole was built and tested. Seven years after selection, the company's own product page still calls it "coming soon".

Where Walk With Path Stands Now

Both companies in the group are active and file their accounts on time. Walk With Path Limited filed its 2025 accounts at Companies House in July 2026. Walk With Path Europe ApS, the Danish company that signed the EU grant, is registered as active and wholly owned by the British parent, according to the Danish register as shown by FirmaAPI, and it filed its 2025 annual report on 30 June 2026 with the Danish Business Authority. North Data labels the Danish company "liq", based on a compulsory dissolution entry from 2018; the register shows that status was lifted on 1 December 2018 and the company has filed every year since.

The company sells one product. Its web shop offers Path Finder, a strap with a laser that projects a line in front of the shoe to help people with Parkinson's disease restart walking when their gait freezes. Path Feel is shown, but not sold. It has also been repositioned: the company now describes it as a set of insoles, an app and a clinician dashboard to prevent diabetic foot ulcers by measuring plantar pressure and temperature, with vibration for balance as one feature among several.

How the Insole Works

The insole contains pressure sensors and inertial measurement units, which track how the wearer walks, and vibrating elements that stimulate the sole when the foot touches the ground, according to the project's CORDIS results summary. Data passes through a phone app to the cloud and to a clinician's dashboard. "The insoles vibrate, helping to provide enhanced sensation for people who have lost sensation in their feet," Pape told CORDIS. The company's final report argued that the alternative, insoles with sensors only, are "passive and do not provide a therapeutic benefit in real-time".

The headline efficacy claims in the grant summary, that the insole improved the balance and mobility of 92% of users and cut their risk of falls by 50%, came from the company's own pre-clinical work and are not linked to any publication on CORDIS. The independent evidence is narrower. In a randomised crossover study at Manchester Metropolitan University, published in Diabetes Care in 2024, 22 men with diabetic peripheral neuropathy walked on level ground and stairs with and without vibrating insoles. Gait speed on stairs increased under three of seven vibration settings, and standing balance with eyes closed improved under four, according to the university's summary reprinted by Diabetes Times. The study measured immediate effects in one session; it did not measure falls.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What the Record Shows

The project ran from 1 November 2019 to 31 December 2022. It was planned for two years and extended into a third because, Pape told CORDIS, recruiting people with diabetes for trials became difficult during the COVID-19 pandemic and electronic components were hard to source. The final periodic report says the clinical study was completed "with good results", gait algorithms were built into the insole firmware, the insole design was finalised "for the MVP status", design-for-manufacturing documents were written and "production took place". It planned "to pilot launch in the US with a commercial partner in March 2023, and to commence NHS pilots around the same time". Pape added in the 2023 CORDIS summary that "We've not yet done full-scale commercial production" and that work was under way on a submission to the US Food and Drug Administration. A new patent application was filed during the project.

Neither the US launch nor an FDA decision has been announced since. The FDA's public 510(k) database returns no clearance for an applicant named Walk With Path, and its establishment registration database returns no listing either. No CE marking for Path Feel was found on the company's site or elsewhere. In March 2024 Pape told Startups Magazine that the company was "on the cusp of going from being very R&D heavy, to becoming more commercially driven", with a US launch planned the following year through a commercial partner in diabetes. In October 2026 the product page still says "coming soon".

1. Finish the prototype, ready for manufactureDeliveredMVP design, manufacturing documents and a production run, per the final report.
2. Clinical validationDeliveredPeer-reviewed crossover study in Diabetes Care, 2024, with 22 participants.
3. CertificationNot achievedNo FDA clearance on record; no CE marking announced.
4. Market launch after the project (US pilot, March 2023)Not achievedStill "coming soon" on the company's site in October 2026.
5. NHS pilotsResearch onlyA 120-patient trial at the Royal Free, not a commercial pilot.

What Came After the Grant

The insole work continued on public money and in hospital research. In July 2022 Walk With Path Limited won £599,229 in the "Delivering a net zero NHS" competition of SBRI Healthcare to test whether the sensor insoles and a telemedicine platform could prevent diabetic foot ulcers and cut patients' travel to clinics. The Royal Free Hospital NHS Foundation Trust began a randomised trial of the insoles, now called Path Active, against usual podiatry care in April 2024, with Walk With Path as industry collaborator and 120 participants planned, according to ClinicalTrials.gov; the record, last updated in April 2025, gives an estimated completion in March 2026, and no results are posted. A separate study of the clinician dashboard in knee replacement patients, sponsored by Imperial College London, received a favourable ethics opinion in October 2023, according to the Health Research Authority.

The Danish company is also a partner in WAge, a Horizon Europe project on healthy working environments coordinated by SINTEF, with a net EU contribution of €405,150 from December 2023 to November 2027, according to CORDIS. In 2026 it received Danish state aid of DKK 2,249,000 for "International Collaborations 2026-2028" and DKK 999,600 under Innobooster, according to North Data; no second source for these awards was found.

In the same year, Path Finder won the European Commission's €1 million Horizon Prize for Social Innovation in September 2019, which Pape said she would use to expand in Europe and enter the US, according to Horizon Magazine and ioplus. The ioplus report names Nuala Burke alongside Pape as a founder; the company's own site and the Commission name only Pape.

The Money

The group's two sets of accounts tell different stories. The British parent, which files only a balance sheet, invested £430,335 in its subsidiary in 2021 and took on £659,993 of other loans due in two to five years in 2022. Its shareholders' funds have fallen every year since 2019 and were negative from 2023, reaching minus £382,691 at the end of 2025, when it had £17,941 in the bank, according to its filed accounts. Its average staff peaked at 11 in 2024 and fell to 7 in 2025.

The Danish grant holder ended 2019, two months into the EIC project, with DKK 8,971,451 in cash and short-term liabilities of DKK 10,241,210. Its equity moved from minus DKK 2,970,849 at the end of 2020 to DKK 2,511,817 a year later; with a 2021 profit of DKK 2,018,929, that implies about DKK 3.46 million of new capital, the year its share capital rose to DKK 87,878, according to the annual reports at the Danish Business Authority. In 2025 it lost DKK 399,397, its cash fell from DKK 3,004,084 to DKK 1,626,705, and it had an average of two employees. Management called the result "unsatisfactory" and said it expected a profit in 2026.

Why Europe Should Care

The grant summary set out the case: the EU population aged 65 and over was projected to reach 88 million by 2030, and falls among older people and people with diabetes, Parkinson's disease or multiple sclerosis put a heavy load on health systems. The Commission backed the same company twice in 2019 on that argument, with the Horizon Prize for mobility of older people and the Path Feel grant. Prevention of diabetic foot ulcers, the insole's newer target, matters too: the Manchester researchers put the number of people with diabetic neuropathy worldwide at 270 million.

The record also shows where the work went. The EU grant was signed by the Danish company, but €618,140.25 of it was paid to the British parent as a linked third party, the later clinical and NHS work ran through British institutions, and the company's website now gives an address in Essex. Since the end of the EU project, the insole has been developed mainly through UK health research, while the Danish company's staff fell to two.

The Verdict

Walk With Path has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records and published statements, linked throughout.