Health
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Background: Making coffee can involve a number of steps (Figure 1). In an effort to streamline this process, many alternative coffee-making approaches have been devised. Among the “simpler” approaches to making coffee include instant coffee (“just add water”) and the often-ridiculed (yet commercially successful) coffee “pod” system (Figure 2). The coffee pod machine (Figure 3)…
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Background: “Incidental exercise” is a term that refers to the physical activity that a person gets during their normal daily routine. For example, a person who lives in an apartment that is three flights of stairs up from the street would get the “incidental exercise“ of climbing three flights of stairs. Proposal: Let’s bring incidental…
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Background: A “pill organizer” (Figure 1) is a container for vitamins, medications, or anything else that a person wants to remember to take on a recurring basis. The Issue: There are many other recurring tasks that could also benefit from a weekly organizer. For example, according to the lobbyists at Big Vegetable, everyone should eat…
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Background: One widely-used metric for encouraging people to maintain a healthy weight is “BMI” (Body Mass Index), which is defined as BMI = (weight / height²), when given a weight* in kilograms and height in meters. [*] Or “mass,” for the highly pedantic. The Issue: Doctors often recommend that humans maintain a BMI in the 18.5–25.0 range, although the…
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Background: Many cities have restrictive zoning requirements that, perhaps justifiably, prevent certain types of construction (for example, building a pesticide manufacturing plant next to an elementary school). Some restrictions are a bit more arbitrary: many “homeowners associations” (HOAs) enforce extremely specific details about the exact shades of beige that a garage door can be painted,…
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Background: Various states of mind, like anxiety, general stress, ennui, are relatively “high level,” and are not immediately related to fight-or-flight survival. Thus, there is a possibility of them being displaced by “higher priority” emotions: e.g. if you’re falling off the top of a skyscraper with only a pool umbrella to use to possibly survive,…
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Background: Cars, trucks, motorcycles, and bicycles all share the roadways.However, drivers often entirely fail to notice bicyclists and motorcyclists. One study even suggests that drivers may often literally tune them out entirely: https://www.google.com/search?q=car+drivers+don%27t+notice+bicycles+study. For this particular idea, let’s focus on motorcycles, although the same general principle will also apply to bicycles. The Issue: At night,…
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Background: Traditional societies in Middle Ages Europe had a somewhat different idea about the nature of illnesses and medicine, which included a theory that the body’s health was regulated by “four humours” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism, also see Fig. 1), a lack of awareness of bacteria or other microorganisms, and a freeform approach to medical treatment. The Issue:…
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Background: Certain types of apartment / home arrangements are rare in the United States (e.g. courtyard apartments or a second “back” unit behind a front house). Such residences are often not directly visible from the road, and accessing them may require going through a gate. They may also have addresses that include fractions or letters,…
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Background: Many types of candy come in pre-wrapped miniature single-serving (or “fun sized”) pieces, especially as Halloween candy. The Issue: For many people, it can be difficult to avoid eating an entire bag / bowl / other-type-of-container of candy. Proposal: We can create a candy dispenser that works as follows: first, the user fills the…
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