Tag: fabby

According to a recent report, many young people don’t wake when a traditional fire alarm sounds at night.

That’s a very serious problem which today’s invention seeks to address.

It takes the form of a conventional smoke alarm which is secured to the ceiling above each young person’s pillow. This device also accommodates a reservoir which can be filled with tap water (say 3 litres).

When the alarm is triggered, the tap water is released, spraying the pillow area with a stream of water. Very few children would sleep through both the aural alarm and the soaking.

Whilst this may be a problem for houses where false alarms are frequent, it’s much better to soak the bed once or twice than to leave open the prospect that a child will be harmed.

Today’s invention is an electric toothbrush which detects each of the different heads used by members of a family.

Equipped with a pressure sensor and a memory chip, it is able to record the duration and pressure history for each user.

The brush would be taken on each visit to the dentist, enabling brushing advice to be given to each individual.

I talked to a woman without pierced ears who said that she couldn’t wear diamond earrings -because clip-ons could never be trusted.

Today’s invention is therefore earrings which emit a sound when they are detached from one’s ear.

The two metal sides of the clip could be made to act as switch contacts in a circuit with a watch battery and a beeper. This would ensure that the wearer became instantly aware of losing one of her earrings.

These devices might even incorporate a sound chip so that earring-tones could be individualised.

Today’s invention is an attempt to overcome one of the bugbears of parenthood -getting a toddler to don a coat.

Youngsters have trouble getting their arms down the sleeves of a winter coat. Their limbs simply aren’t rigid enough, they can’t follow instructions and it takes maybe five minutes to squirm each arm down a sleeve. This process can even hurt a child’s hand if a parent is impatient.

Instead, I propose coats with sleeves which each have a zip running from armpit to cuff. To help a child get dressed, unzip the arm sleeve and pass their hand through the shoulder hole, grabbing it with your other hand through the unzipped arm.

Once the body of the coat is on, each sleeve can be zipped downwards around their arm with minimal distress and wasted time.

Vegas pit bosses will be delighted by today’s invention. It takes gaming machines a little closer to the equally ghastly world of reality TV.

Imagine a one-armed bandit-style gaming machine, equipped with a camera and a display screen.

Such a machine would, when not in use, constantly show a movie loop of people who had won whilst playing that particular machine…exactly at the moment they won.

This would be compelling for the passing public and encourage them to play the machine whose winning faces most appealed to them.

Queueing in supermarkets is a source of stress that no customer should have inflicted on them.

Today’s invention is a stupidly simple way to alleviate the problem.

Customers can pick up a sign in-store which they attach to the front of their trolley. This enables them to enter a fast aisle in which every trolley is dealt with by two checkout staff.

Their tills communicate to form a single combined bill, so that the escape from the shop is accelerated (by a factor approaching two).

The charge made for this service would be included in one’s bill and would be adjusted so as to control the queue lengths at these double tills.

I often have to insert a season ticket into a railway station ticket barrier.

These tickets are made of paper and have a lifetime which is much less than that of the season in question. This usually necessitates several trips to get replacements from the not-always friendly, and much queued-for, ticket office. It also causes roadblocks at rush-hour when the people behind me suddenly have to stop and reverse to let me reverse.

Today’s invention is a ticket barrier which reads the incoming ticket as normal and assesses the readability of the information.

If it is lower than a threshold value, suggesting that it’s about to become useless by virtue of normal wear (but hasn’t been tampered with), the barrier itself will immediately print a new ticket and output that as I pass through (retaining the original for later destruction and or analysis).

Today’s invention is a system for ultra cautious drivers.

Instead of using just their own safety belt, when traveling on their own, they can insert a two-way catch (blue) into their belt mooring which allows them to clip both their own belt and that from the passenger seat around them.