Archive for: September 2011

If you share some piece of equipment with several colleagues or flatmates, there is sometimes a need to monitor hygiene.

Today’s invention is an internal camera which detects the sudden appearance of a mess within eg a microwave oven (by looking for any contrasting blots or blobs on the pristine white walls/floor) and then captures an image of the next person to open the door.

It would be quite amusing to use face recognition to issue a verbal warning “That’s the second time this week you’ve made a mess [facename = Jean]”

This could be applied to other shared facilities but many of them couldn’t legally be equipped with an imaging device.

Making a colourful circular display using lights and the persistence of vision is a technology that you can buy off the shelf to decorate your car’s wheels.

Today’s invention is an upgrade to that approach.

If you are sick of the small size of your smartphone screen, you can clamp the device onto a handle with an internal motor and spin it, as shown.

Running an application simultaneously allows the persistence of vision to show eg messages or even low-res movies on a virtual screen area roughly 3Pi/4 times as big.

Today’s invention is a toilet seat which is hinged at the front of the toilet. This would be (strongly) sprung open by default (ie standing vertically at the front of the bowl).

To use it either simply back onto it and sit down -or to use it standing up, move around to one side.

This has the twin advantages that people with difficulty sitting down smoothly can locate themselves safely. Also, no handling of the seat is required.

(No sign of this anywhere in various patent databases, but that may be because of my limited choice of search terms)

Counting the numbers of people in crowds is apparently an increasingly contentious task -given that these estimates are used as a proxy for the strength of feeling behind a range of political causes.

There are already numerous ways to count heads -the most sensible approach seems to me to be to use Amazon’s Mechanical Turk process.

Rather than ask the human operatives who do this work, each to count a whole crowd, today’s invention hands each of them only a small part of an aerial photo of the event (taken by a UAV, if necessary)

Where can you find a collection of willing counters? Send the snapshots to the smartphones of members of the crowd itself (perhaps by displaying a phone number on a hoarding which people in the crowd walk past). They might then enter a draw for some event-relevant prize.

The result would be that each subsection of crowd could be counted by ten of its members, resulting in much higher accuracy.

It could be argued that people on a march might be inclined to overestimate the figures, so this effect could be measured by passing certain calibration shots to distant analysts. A better solution, however, would be to exchange pictures between unrelated events.

It seems that concussion-type injuries are exacerbated when the head is accelerated hard about the vertical axis of the neck.

This causes neurons in the frontal brain regions to be particularly severely stretched and damaged.

Today’s invention is a modification to safety helmets so that they can respond to incoming impacts (illustrated as pressure waves in blue).

When accelerometers in the helmet detect a dangerous rotation rate about the neck axis (shown as a cross), compressed air jets located on the chin and forehead are activated, so as to resist the impact force profile.

There would be two jets pointing left and two pointing right to deal with impacts from either side.

This lowers the rotation rate of the head itself, minimising possible injuries to the frontal lobes.

Everyone who meets at my local coffee shop seems to do so mostly at 10:30 am, secondly on the hour and third most frequently, every half hour. This reminds me of the El Farol problem.

Today’s invention offers a way to even out the staff-stress and waiting times.

It is simply to adopt a congestion charge. Make the prices, displayed electronically, all increase as the headcount of customers increases within the coffee shop.

The level of increase required to redistribute the customers to other times of the day, without alienating them by absurdly large pricehikes, would require some experimentation.

It’s probably better to treat it as a dynamic ‘happy hour’ in which prices, which are high by default, decrease as the crowds disperse.

If you want to have a military vehicle which can successfully traverse hilly, rough terrain, as well as high-tail it (stably) down a motorway, compromises about wheelbase length usually have to be made.

Today’s invention offers a new way to think about this problem.

A wheeled digger-type vehicle could be converted to a variable-wheelbase machine by providing it with a set of road wheels which could be easily clamped to the bucket at the front.

Press down with the bucket controls and the front wheels lift off the surface, allowing the machine to move on the bucket wheels and rear wheels only.

Varying the reach of the bucket provides the possibility of changing the wheelbase whilst in motion.

Economy class fliers don’t get much legroom and the overhead lockers are a source of dispute and potential danger.

Today’s invention is a way for passengers to sit more comfortably.

Airline seats would consist of a back, straps and headrest only. Passengers would bring on board their own seat base. This would have to stay within outer dimensional limits but could be specially padded and formed to fit the user’s back, rear-end and leg shape.

Each of these seats would act as the traveller’s hand baggage, so that overhead lockers need not be provided.

One surprising thing is that many mountain tops seem to have mobile phone reception. They also often find themselves suddenly shrouded in mist.

Today’s invention is an app for a smartphone (something like this one).

Instead of showing people those stars which are invisible, the app in question would show the view, from anywhere on a mountain walk, which would be visible if the mist had not descended.

This could be a lifesaver for anyone lost, but also it might reduce disappointment for visitors who just happen to ascend on the wrong day to experience the scenic views they require.

I used to have a radio-controlled clock, with an analogue face, which was accurate to half a second per decade or something ridiculous.

My problem was that the mechanics of driving the minute hand were cheap and nasty plastic -so that it was always about half a degree away from the minute divisions on the face. This was especially noticeable because of the visual hyperacuity we all have for detecting misalignment.

Also, the vibration of the end of the minute hand made reading the time annoying…especially since the face was inscribed with various boasts about the device’s accuracy.

Today’s invention is such a clock but with the minute hand drawn on a rotating disk. This allows the hand to be set up in the factory exactly in line with the stationary minute divisions marked around the inner edge of the clock.

It also removes any possible waggling of the minute hand about its proper position.