Category: Possible inventions

A research supervisior of mine once explained that getting iron fragments from munitions inside the eye had blinded many servicemen.

Today’s invention is a way to use magnmetic material to help improve vision.

Imagine three (or more) contact lenses joined to form a strip of varying optical power and placed on the iris as shown. These would have tiny ferromagnetic particles moulded into the edge.

A set of small, strong electromagnets embedded in the (optically neutral) glasses frames could be switched on and off in sequence to translate the lenses across the lubricated eye surface and thus offer a much more flexible visual augmentation than any normal lenses or glasses.

Ideally, the change in lenses could be driven by detection of a long blink for ‘move right’ and two such blinks for ‘move left’.

It seems that significant numbers of people wearing earphones are so absorbed in their music that they step into the path of oncoming vehicles.

This will become an increasing problem when vehicles become electrically-driven.

Today’s invention offers improved safety for these people. It takes the form of a microphone mounted on the headphones.

When other people see you about to step off the curb at a dangerous moment, they simply say the word ‘HALT’ or some other easy, universal keyword -even if they are across the street.

The headphone system is programmed to detect and recognise this term and will at once issue a verbal warning to the wearer.

This might say “Stop MrX” or simply deliver a loud, simulated engine noise or screeching brakes to one ear.

In this way, an individual can be more safe because of the vigilance of the crowd around him.

Everyone who has ever had children travel in their car will understand what a total pain it is that they can never seem to do up their own seatbelts.

It takes children years to develop the dexterity and focus to strap themselves in and even then when you ask…”are you buckled in?” the answer can’t be fully trusted until they are about 25.

Today’s invention is a small speaker module which clips on to the buckle of a child seat. When the seat buckle is locked, a circuit is made that causes a sound chip in the module to emit a brief message -eg applause or a congratulatory remark.

This provides added incentive to a child to try to clip themselves in safely and also confirms for a parent in the front that this has been achieved.

The incentive might be further increased by having the module record and mention the name of the individual child in question.

There are some people who are still diehard collectors of vinyl LPs.

These folk will often have shelves packed with records (as shown in cross-section A).

Today’s invention is in the form of triangular inserts (pale blue) for the shelves (B).

Such additions would still allow the LPs to be conveniently stored, but they would also act as the absorptive surfaces of an anechoic chamber -providing a better, isolated listening environment for purist, old-school audiophiles.

It seems that on-screen disclaimers, in eg adverts on behalf of trusted brands, can scroll by rapidly without causing an audience any concern.

The sort of thing I mean is a subtitled statement saying eg “The value of investments can go up as well as down and past performance is no indicator of future returns. Your home is in danger if you fail to make payments…”

People object strongly, however, to these rapid-fire messages from less trusted organisations.

Today’s invention is to allow a test audience to communally determine the optimal speed for a given subtitle disclaimer -especially for banking services.

(Since this occurs in parallel with some other aspect of the advert, it’s not just about getting the disclaimer over as fast as possible).

The speed chosen by eg audience clickers would therefore provide another way to determine the real degree of customer trust in the advertiser’s brand.

Houseplants always die when left in my care. When looking wrinkly,droopy,yellowish or shedding, they receive the same treatment: a good watering.

Today’s invention tries to overcome my horticultural ineptitude.

A webcam watches each bank of houseplants. This can be made to detect any difference between frames taken at the same time each day.

Progressive shape or colour changes are relatively easy to spot using image processing software and, when found, would alert my smartphone.

A smarter version would attempt to diagnose the problem, based on a small expert system (+ barcodes on the pots), and suggest remedies like ‘move this one out of the sun and give this other one a good pruning’ (or whatever).

Today’s invention is a new form of die (inspired by this and this).

Conventional dice are open to the accusation that they are unfair -due to the inbuilt moment-of-inertia asymmetries of different faces (eg six recessed dots don’t rotate in exactly the same way as two). This new die attempts to avoid that problem.

The design consists of a dished cube set within an outer,transparent cube. The inner is fixed within the outer by thin arms at the 8 corners.

The space between inner and outer contains 42 identical spheres.

Each of the dishes is made to accommodate up to six of them when the die is tossed (there is a gap between inner and outer which is just a little more than one sphere-diameter deep, so that spheres can only form a monolayer).

The remaining spheres crash to the bottom of the die each time.

I’m always frustrated by my inability to map finger movements onto those required by almost any musical instrument (yes, even the tambourine).

Today’s invention is a screen fitted to a piano which, instead of all that squiggly symbolism from left to right, shows ten finger positions above the keys that need pressed to make the right noises.

The screen would animate these positions by scrolling them towards the player (as if printed on a roll of paper). This would aid development of some anticipation of where the fingers need to move to next.

…Necessarily rudimentary for those of us excluded, neurologically, from any conventional music theory.

When I drive down a motorway I’m always irritated by the fact that strings of giant lorries (ie trucks) occlude my view of upcoming roadside signs.

Those mounted on overhead gantries are fine, but I often miss turnoffs, because either the sign or the road itself are hidden behind a nose-to-tail fleet of freight-filled behemoths.

Today’s invention is a simple solution.

Tall lorries would be required to have a uniform road turnoff sign painted on their rear face.

Besides the turnoff symbol, an illuminated screen would be attached as shown.

This would be activated by a wireless signal from the real, hidden sign (or via GPS) so that the last truck would always be showing me the name of the town to which the next slip road leads (as well as its distance away).