Even though automated telemedicine is all set to take over healthcare, people will still need to see a medical practitioner in the flesh on occasion.

Their fee rates require that there will always be too few of them to go around -which necessitates, in turn, the survival of the waiting room.

The ancient, germ-promoting magazines will eventually be replaced by tablets or interactive surfaces.

Today’s invention is an application running on all such networked machines. Since the ability to control one’s surroundings affects people’s health this would allow the current constituency of waiting folk to vote for which selection of music or TV channel should currently prevail.

This system would allow a truly democratic choice to be made, rather than the default ‘middle of the road easy listenin’ of eg Radio 2.

A rolling average choice could be calculated every 10 minutes or so.

Such a system could easily be provided in hairdressers, airports and bars as well and should also offer the option of silence.

(If you really must have a recorded soundtrack, you can bring your own speakers and plug them in -before visiting the audiologist).

Many armoured vehicles carry extra plating in order to pre-detonate incoming armour-piercing shells.

Today’s invention is to extend this idea to the provision of a double layer of plates to each side of such a vehicle.

This hinged plate unit could be moved to an angled orientation in order to provide improved deflection capabilities for incoming rockets etc.

The movement would be electrically driven and controlled from inside.

In defence against small arms fire, this unit might even be swung outwards under electronic control to ‘bat’ missiles back at those who launched them.

The double wall would also allow infantrymen to perch and shelter within this gap during movements towards a battle area.

I’m a great admirer of this technique for creating images in grass by controlling local photosynthesis.

Today’s invention is related but perhaps more prosaic.

It’s a robot lawnmover the depth of cut of which can be varied in the course of its transit across a lawn.

It would therefore leave behind patterns corresponding to the greyscales in an image.

Pictures could be programmed into one’s grass including those which are distorted so as to appear standing up from the ground (when viewed, eg, from one’s house).

People with gardens alongside motorways, trainlines or runways might be paid to have their robot mowers advertise certain brands.

I have been hearing some dreadful stories about people marooned in lifts.

In movies, such unfortunates always find a trapdoor to allow them to climb up or down the liftshaft. This would be highly dangerous and today’s invention offers an alternative.

A lift is shown stuck between floors 3 and 4. Conventional lift doors would be impossible to open.

Instead, why not have doors which are made in horizontal strips?

These would normally be locked together but when the lift emergency button was pressed, the strips (yellow in cross-section) would be individually rendered free to swing outwards (blue). This would limit any sudden vertical movements of the lift whilst occupants exited to either floor n or n+1.

The potential mind-numbing effects of a long weekend in limbo would thus be avoided.

Which words are the easiest to type for a person using only one hand?

Every word in a dictioanry could be evaluated in terms of the total distance one’s hand has to move to type it, if you are doing it with only one finger (There might even be a slightly different calculation based on a user’s average finger length).

Words could then be ordered according to how much finger movement distance was required to type each of them in.

A keyboard user would then be able to use this scale to influence their autosuggest function (on the basis that they will probably want to type the easiest version of any given word).

If you buy a hot drink to take away, then it will often be served in a cardboard cup with a plastic lid. This arrangement is also good for warming the hands on a cold day.

Today’s invention extends this concept to create a new form of hot drink container.

This would be in the shape of a hotwater bottle, with moulded-in surface bumps to allow prolonged skin contact.

A flat, flexible bottle could be made using bio-inert plastic and, rather than being disposable, could be washed and stored in an outdoor coat for example. This would have a screw-fit seal and might be dispensed initially from a vending machine.

When you were standing at a sports event in winter or on an icy station platform you could insert the container into an interior pocket, or up your jersey, in between drinks.