Health
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Background: Health care is expensive—but it could be cheaper, if labor were cheaper (apparently somewhere between half and two-thirds of costs go to salaries). The issue: Unfortunately, doctors and nurses will probably remain relatively expensive—but what if we can recruit cheap labor to do some of the tasks that normally require a highly-trained medical professional?…
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Background: People occasionally forget to lock the door before leaving the house, or leave a stove on by accident, or any number of other things. “Internet of Things” aficionados often suggest that you could, say, turn on and off your stove from your phone, but now someone on the Internet thousands of miles away can…
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Background: A lot of kitchen tools have a non-electric version that is hand-cranked: for example, a coffee grinder, ice-cream maker, mixer, or salad-spinner. Additional common hand-powered items include the can opener and pepper mill. The issue: Unfortunately, many of these tools are slow and inefficient to operate by hand. However, if there were some way…
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Background: Most methods of catching fish—with the notable exception of bare-hand catfish noodling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noodling)—do not involve direct contact with the to-be-fished aquatic life. Proposal: In order to both: make humans more attuned to nature and to promote a fishing method that discourages overfishing… …the following “baleen fishing attachment mesh” is proposed. This “baleen mesh” is a…
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Background: Even the most un-choosy eater cares at least somewhat about the visual appearance of food. A food item that looks “off” somehow will trigger a natural aversion to spoiled food. Proposal: This aversion to bizarre looking food can be used to help people maintain a healthy diet! The process is as follows: certain foods…
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Background: Exercise routines are often extremely dry and boring. But they can be made more engaging by making a “themed” workout, with each part of a workout helping to accomplish an imaginary goal. This is not a totally new idea. For example, the game “Zombies Run” motivates a person to jog faster by providing a…
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Background: The stop sign, for all its utilitarian simplicity, has a severe and critical shortcoming: it has two different roles, both marked by the same sign (Figure 1). The two situations, and what the driver must do in each case: All-way stop: driver can casually check for other cars right there at the intersection, and…
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Background: If you have a communal coffee carafe at work, you will undoubtedly have encountered the situation where someone poured the last cup of coffee and didn’t make a new pot. With a standard coffeepot or carafe, there’s no possibility of getting “just one more cup” out of an empty container—it’s just empty. But!…
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The issue: For most snack foods, it’s easy to eat a HUGE quantity of the food in question. This is no surprise—snack foods were specifically designed to be easy to eat. Plus even after you’ve eaten a bunch, it takes a minute or two to feel full. Proposal: Here is a technique to eat fewer…
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You won’t believe how I never fell into a bottomless pit again, thanks to this one weird trick. Podiatrists hate it! Probably.
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Background: One of the leading causes of sidewalk-based injury is tripping on uneven pavement and/or falling into a manhole. Figure 1 illustrates one of the dangers inherent in modern sidewalks. This danger has become even more pronounced now that people are more likely to be looking at their cell phones as they walk. Fig. 1:…
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