Smart Sofa Recognizes Occupants by Weight

I am Kobayashi writes "According to CNN.com scientists at Trinity College in Dublin have created my dream couch. And yes, I admit to being a couch potato... Apparently the couch can be programmed with a personal greeting (it recognizes you by weight), and the scientists hope that it will one day be able to automatically tune to your favorite television programs, order you take out food, and control other household appliances."

Comments

Re:Recognizing by weight

[panaceaa]

Also, people's weight changes throughout the day. People eat, go to the bathroom, and also generally weigh more during the evening than average. Is the couch going to have a programmed clock for that?

If I were a scientist, I'd try to identify people based on their butt prints!

Fit for the real world?

[Barnoid]

My experience is that every member of our family has his dedicated seat and always sits on the same couch even when he/her is alone.

Those lucky of you who live with your wife/girlfriend and have 'your own' couch, does your partner really use it when you are not there?

Maybe a simple 'ass present' sensor would be sufficient..

--
I'm a-huga bimbo

Re:butt print...

[panaceaa]

If people can be identified to some degree by weight alone, I'm sure that having a pressure-sensitive map of someone's weight distribution (butt print) could only be more accurate. Also, you can learn something identifiable by how specific people slouch or lie down, how much they lean back, and other behavioral traits like antsiness. Though detecting these traits would be far more complicated than putting a scale under each pillow.

Maybe the pillows wouldn't detect weight itself, but the shape of the imprentation using lots of small censors that detect motion. That motion could be integrated (calculus) to calculate their current position. The individual data points could be used together to figure out someone's current position, how their weight is distributed, and how much they move around over time. However, are there affordable censors that can do that? Alternatively, are there censors that can somehow know their absolute location rather than using calculus?