Today’s invention is for people with a reduced blood circulation or with a weak heart.
In an attempt to supplement the normal circulatory system, a number of small, external peristaltic pumps would be strapped on, in contact with major veins.
These pumps would detect the user’s current heartbeat rate and the pump rollers automatically driven to rotate correspondingly.
They would thus help return blood from eg arms and legs, lessening the stress placed on the heart itself.
If you are always losing your pens and/or always snapping the folding legs off your glasses, today’s invention is for you.
This consists of a set of lenses with legs which screw in and can thus be detached -allowing all three elements to be stored flat in a pocket.
Each of the legs is also a pen and therefore always conveniently available.
In olden days, tourist sites used to be bedeviled by photographers vying with each other to take pictures of visitors in return for cash.
Today’s invention upgrades that idea to allow venues more control of the concession. Each tourist location would have a small number of mobile photobooths: robot photo-vending machines which would:
–accept credit card payment
–shine a light onto the ground indicating where the subjects should stand
–move themselves so as to guarantee a unique shot
–use face recognition so people are not obscuring the location’s main features
–take a near-professional quality image (or video)
–display the shots and then send the photos wirelessly to mobile or home systems.
Felt markers are generally very useful, until you need to create a mix of thick and thin lines (try switching from flip chart to writing on a postit note using a standard Sharpie).
Today’s invention is a felt marker with a ‘nib’ on either end and sharing the same ink reservoir.
Each nib would have its own sealable cap as usual, but one would be much finer than the other.
When I’m making tea, I can often find myself boiling the water, searching for teabags etc and then absent-mindedly flicking the kettle switch back to ‘on’ without really needing to reboil.
Today’s invention is therefore a kettle whose bimetallic switch will only allow the water to be heated if it is, say, >5 degrees below 100C.
At higher temperatures, the tea won’t actually suffer noticeably taste-wise at all.
Thus, if the water temperature is 98C and you flick the kettle on, instead of wasting a huge amount of energy, the kettle will emit satisfying recorded noises of water boiling.
Today’s invention is a productivity tool, based on my belief that much of the difficulty with ‘information overload’ is to do with the look of the dreaded Inbox.
Subject lines are meant to allow you to prioritise your reading, but in fact I’ve noticed that I tend to delay opening anything marked ‘Urgent meeting request’ or ‘Our response to your proposal’ or ‘Any news on the report?.’
Today’s invention is an email program which replaces the Subject line by a set of ASCII characters.
When the Inbox is viewed as a list, no Subjects are visible, but the whole thing takes on the appearance of ASCII Art. Every time an email has been dealt with, the Inbox list view updates to show a new image.
Messages are thus less discouraging and they might as well be opened in inbox order, thus lessening the procrastination which subject headers create.
When you take a flash photograph, the brightness can dazzle people, disrupting the composition of subsequent shots and annoying their subjects.
Today’s invention is therefore a flash gun, equipped with face recognition. This allows it to know where any eyes are located within the image.
Just before the flashgun fires, an LCD mask over the flash window blanks out a patch corresponding to the rays heading to any pairs of eyes in the scene.
Although diffraction around the mask would cause some flash light to enter people’s eyes, the intensity could be arranged to be so low that the flash event itself went largely unnoticed.
The result would be effective illumination, without dazzling anyone, and also enabling largely unobserved photography.
My Grandfather used to shout at the television when it foolishly displayed stuff he disagreed with.
Today’s invention is broadcast devices, ie TVs and radios, which can take such feedback seriously.
At its simplest, a radio might have a microphone system capable of recognising a small selection of keywords spoken by a listener eg “Nonsense!” These would be transmitted back to the station to provide detailed, realtime feedback about programme content.
Generate enough cries of “Next!” and the programme would step forward to a subsequent item.
It’s easy to scan a product in a shop with eg a smartphone and get a tonne of information about the damage it caused by being flown around the planet, how many calories it will attach to your waistline etc., etc.
Today’s invention extends that idea into a new dimension: profit.
Each product would be assessed by an online crowd of experts with inside knowledge of processing and manufacture in a number of industries. They would come up with an estimate of its cost to make and appear on the shelf.
This would then allow one’s phone to indicate the markup being asked by the store and provide consumers with visibility of a seller’s true pricing policy.
When plants grow too tall, they start to take over a domestic environment.
Today’s invention is a plant pot stand which can measure the height of the plant placed on it (say daily, by using a photocell to spot the shadow of the plant on the adjacent wall at a fixed time each day). It would then, very gradually, reduce its own height to compensate -keeping the plant’s tallest point at a fixed vertical location.
This would be achieved by having a very slow-rate screw built into the stand’s telescopic column. Rotation of the stand on the screw would be via a battery-driven electric motor and a suitable gearbox.
