Archive for: April 2009

Today’s invention is a substitute pillow, consisting of an array of rods on the end of each of which is a small rubbery sphere (like a squash ball).

The rods are free to move vertically, each being supported by a spring and damper mechanism. This allows someone to sleep comfortably on the tightly-packed matrix, receiving full neck support, irrespective of whether they lie on their back or side. The spring rates might be controlled electronically to provide the optimal personalised stiffness distribution for comfort.

Several such pillows could be used to create an entire bed surface. The rods might also be vibrated to avoid the possibility of bedsores.

Having had to use a TENS machine for pain relief recently, I soon got bored with the stored patterns of electrical stimulation (to which the muscles adapt very quickly).

So I thought that today’s invention should be a new TENS device in which the electrical signals are driven by the frequencies of the wearer’s music being played on his/her MP3 player.

This would help the therapeutic effects of listening to music and provide a much wider variety of massage for the tissues.

Do the people at Hot or Not actually do anything commercially valuable with all those photographs; all those data about people’s preferences? Maybe the figures gathered aren’t actually very meaningful (given that most of the photographs are usually abysmal).

Anyway, I’ve been losing sleep again about advertising. Now that there is an intensifying war going on to capture people’s attention, where are they actually looking? Answer: at members of the opposite sex.

Today’s invention is a business model which consists of ranking the attractiveness of a large number of people (eg via Facebook or the HON site mentioned above). For, say, the 1000 top-ranked attractive women in a given city, supply them with a Cafepress T shirt with information about products of interest to young men (bars, cars, jobs, whatever). It’s not clear if this would work reciprocally for female customers and T-shirted males.

The females would be publicly identified by their shirt as significantly more attractive than average and could be further incentivised by the shirts each carrying a personal code -so that purchases driven by it could result in the wearer receiving a % payment.

It seems that people appreciate an increasingly wide range of avante-garde wristwatches.

Today’s invention is one such: consisting of a strip of gel on a paper substrate. This has gradations marked on it corresponding to the hours of the day.

A drop of dye is placed at a start-point on the strip at a known time in the morning. This moves along the strip at a known rate by the familiar process of chromotography. It passes the gradations and thus indicates the time.

This can be disposed of at the end of the day and a new strip watch wrapped around one’s wrist.

I have a friend who tends to shout into her phone…my hearing is not too acute and yet I can listen to her clearly with the phone held 0.5m from my ear.

Today’s invention is a software function built into phones which allows the volume setting to be adjusted according to the incoming number.

Once the volume is manually adjusted, the first time each person calls, this optimal listening level is stored with their number so that quiet speakers are boosted automatically (and vice versa).

Those who work with wheelbarrows, only occasionally, know that moving loads about in this way can be hard work and even cause injury.

This applies particularly when the barrow is first lifted off the deck (when the back may be used more than the legs) and also when tipping material out of the barrow by lifting the handles as shown.

Today’s invention is a small lever device, inspired by the centre stands which racing motorcycles use.

This would allow the user to flip the lever down from its storage position above the sides of the barrow onto the ground and stand on the plate, thus raising the handles a little so as to be reached more easily without bending one’s back.

Then, when emptying the barrow, it could be stepped on again, fully, as shown. This would drive the roller forward and lock the barrow safely in position so that the hands could be repositioned to allow the whole system to be thrust forward.

Today’s invention provides a way for people who feel surrounded by security cameras to detect their blindspots and thus maintain some privacy (presumably such spots are by definition of no significance for actual security).

It is essentially a torch which projects a bright, conical beam and which can be attached to the outside of a security camera housing. The beam’s lightcone might be adjustable to be just wider than the normal angle subtended by a camera lens. By aligning it with the housing’s long axis, the beam can be made to shine wherever the camera is ‘looking’…thus leaving unsurveilled regions in comparative darkness.

The torch would move with any motion of the camera and it would also be possible to see where several cameras’ viewfields intersected.

The stories older people tell reflect their wide and often interesting experience (and social reminiscing is good for mental health) but sometimes they can be repeated too often -to the same people.

Today’s invention is a game in the form of an iphone app. which makes the best use of their stories for everyone’s enjoyment whilst minimising the unwanted repeats.

A group of storytellers sits down and notes, using a pulldown menu of the names of their friends and relations, everyone who is present. Each player has prerecorded some short stories, jokes etc into their machine (together with a rough transcript of each -or just keywords).

One player starts playing his recorded story (he can only choose one that the others present have heard no more than x times in the last y years, for example). The machines are networked and so the currently speaking one passes its transcript wirelessly to the others in the group and keywords within it prime some of their stored stories to be ready to be played next. When one is finished, the other players attempt to play their next related story. The fastest to press ‘play’ then proceeds. This helps tune people’s reflexes and the playback approach avoids the embarrassment of forgetting punchlines etc.

Whoever is the last one with stories still to tell is the winner. There might even be a way for stories to be rated so that only the most interesting and popular are available for frequent reuse.

Despite disliking golf, I can’t seem to stop thinking about it.

Today’s invention is a camera system which sits atop the flag at a green and makes a panoramic movie of the area within, say, a 10 m radius. It also records temperature and relative humidity (if these are relevant to the dynamics of putting).

When a ball drops into the cup, the last 20 seconds of action on the green and relevant environmental data are stored. Some of this footage will show putts, from a range of distances, which were successful.

Over time, a huge number of these trajectories is stored for each green. For training purposes, players can later access, via a handheld device, a view of the green indicating the path which they should attempt to make their ball follow from its current location.

There has recently been much discussion, in the news media, about the new era of piracy in which we find ourselves -not the digital ‘piracy’ invented by greedy media moguls but the real thing -complete with AK47s and speedboats. (According to the BBC, piracy cost the world $60 – 70m in 2008, so I’m not clear why this is even seen as an important issue, given that banking costs the world this amount every few minutes).

The pirates’ modus operandi is to board vessels without warning and hold their crew and cargo for ransom.

Today’s invention is a way to provide the crew with more notice of an attack. Each ship travelling in a region subject to piracy (maybe a few hundred vessels) would be equipped with a set of cameras capturing both visual spectrum and infra red images. These would constantly scan the ship’s surroundings and beam images to a webpage for the ship in question.

These pages would be displayed 24/7 on screens in prominent locations…(perhaps in railway stations and supermarkets, where large numbers of people have nothing better to do than watch displays as they wait).

This crowdsourced vigilance would result in mobile phone calls to a displayed number in the event that enough people detected some suspicious behaviour and acted to warn the ship in question. Prizes for accurate warnings might be offered.