Household
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Background: As civilization reaches an apex of decadence not seen since the days of Caligula, new and exotic labor-saving schemes have arisen. Specifically, you may soon be able to order food directly to your refrigerator, thus saving you from having to be present for delivery. Deluxe! The issue: While the process of delivering food directly…
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Background: In order to support technological progress, many people are willing to endure great hardships. The issue: For example, most Americans are willing to drive for 30–60 minutes every day on their commute, just so that they can help create a market for new types of transportation [*]. One might imagine that a person in…
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TITLE: Never be annoyed when emptying an over-full trash can again, with this new “screaming trash can” technology! The Issue: In shared-living or office situations, there is a strong incentive to wait for someone else to empty a full garbage can: the person who discards the last piece of trash has only contributed a tiny…
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The issue: Once in a while, people accidentally forget to turn off a water faucet (e.g. a bathroom or kitchen faucet) and leave it running all day. This wastes water, and is unacceptable. Proposal: There are existing solutions to automatically turn off faucets, but generally they are either incredibly annoying (the motion-activated faucets that work…
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Background: Every year, a large number of children accidentally poison themselves by drinking household chemicals. Cleaning products and pesticides (Figure 1) represent the cause of ~15% of poisoning cases in children under the age of 6, according to the National Capital Poison Center. The issue: To a child who is illiterate and unfamiliar with conventional…
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Background: It’s difficult to move heavy furniture around, so furniture is usually positioned for general use, even if there are specific setups that would be better for rare situations. For example, your home might have a room that would be best configured in one way for watching movies, but a different way for a Thanksgiving…
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Background: When baking a pizza in an oven, it’s it’s easy to remove the pizza from the oven and instantly start devouring it. The issue: Unfortunately, molten cheese (Fig. 1) cannot coexist with human tissue, so this causes severe burns to the impatient pizza-eater. Proposal: We can prevent further occurrences of this culinary tragedy by…
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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 “three-way light switch” (i.e. two switches that control the same light) is useful when there are multiple places that need to control a single light, such as at both the top and the bottom of a staircase. The issue: Unfortunately, three-way switches are often out of sync with the actual state of the…
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Background: Sometimes, if you are groggily taking a shower in the morning without paying much attention, you may forget whether or not you’ve already washed your hair (Figure 1). The issue: You can, of course, always wash your hair again, but then you wasted both time AND shampoo. What if the bottle itself could…
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