Having a family with a predisposition towards travel sickness is often a problem. I’d like a journey planner which could not only find me the shortest path between A and B, or avoid toll roads, but could also indicate the route which was least likely to require me to hose out the car later.
Today’s invention is a simple algorithm which can be used to calculate a value for the nausea potential of any road journey. Conventional online road planners already assign a value for sensible speed to any point on a journey. Using this value of local speed, it’s easy to calculate the accelerative forces (‘g’) on passengers, which I believe are what cause the illness.
I assume that experiencing a high ‘g’ force for a longer time causes a proportional increase in sickness. At any point on the road for which the speed v is known, the instantaneous queasiness index q is given by v/r (where r is the radius of curvature of the road at any point). Totalling this along the length of a number of candidate routes would allow the least unpleasant travel experience to be selected (the one with smallest total q).
This approach might be easily be extended to include g forces associated with driving up and down hills.
Google Streetview exists, so we might as well put all that driving around and invading privacy to some use. We could extract the required geometry for this invention direct from their image data.