Slashdot Mirror
IBM Patent: Smart Floors Detect Heart Attacks, Intruders
An anonymous reader writes "An IBM patent issued in March describes multitouch floors that detect who is in the home and what they're doing – perfect for detecting intruders and falls, notes MSNBC. CEPro.com suggests the technology also could be used to replace cameras and sensor arrays typically required for gesture control, and could detect staggering teens and 'unregistered' boyfriends. The floors could have 'tremendous implications for home health technology.'"
Michael Jackson - Billie jean.
Yep, only let registered, pre-approved and guaranteed condom carrying boyfriends into the house. Help prevented that health hazard called pregnancy :)
"But everything they said was surely tattled back to the overness, if only by the dust at their feet."
</shudder>
In IBM/Soviet Floor Industry, Smart Floor Stand on YOU! But seriously, this stupid patent actually mentions "detecting your teens throwning a party while you are away, if the floor detects there are more than six people in the house". Is this really a problem that needs a technological solution? And how much does it cost to have 400 sq meters of "smart floor" installed in your house to begin with? 50K or so?
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
Great, a floor that tells me I eat too much and need to lose weight. Its kind of like a mother in law but you can't typically stand on top of your mother in law 24/7.
No tin-foil hats for this one, you just have to get extremely great at playing lava on the floor
In Soviet Russia, your mother-in-law stand on YOU!
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
("Buildering"? Drunk Buildering? Could be big!)
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
How long before we see the first advertisement for special shoes to shield us from smart floors?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
There have been floor based pressure sensor for more than a decade that do these things and they're not from IBM. The earliest uses I am aware of were for security and access control purposes (to detect when someone walked in behind someone else that had an access card.
Loading...
This should lead to some very interesting Batman-like robberies.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
What's to stop an advertiser from tracking my movement to try to sell me softer toilet paper while I poo?
Why hasn't this been thought of yet? 'Smart Thrones' which do chemical analysis of your 'output' to suggest food items that might interest you and balance your body chemistry. In addition, it could measure toilet paper usage and suggest firmer/softer lines based on time needed and amount of blood added during that period.
It could even recognize and analyze vomit to see if it should advertise antacid, hangover remedies, or go straight ahead and call 911!
In theory, patents are designed to protect "genuinely new and useful inventions" from being copied/manufactured instantly by just anyone. This is intended to reward the inventor for doing "the hard work of inventing". In practice, big companies will file for a patent for virtually anything, and anything at all, that they can think of. Sometimes this doesn't work, because the "device" or "method" supposedly being invented is something ludicrously obvious. But in many cases, patents are simply handed out on a "first applicant gets the patent" basis. If you are the first to file the patent, you are the party that will receive the patent. Even if it is something bloody obvious. Like a pressure-sensitive floor (I've seen this done, experimentally, over a decade ago).
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
If you are someone who has a vested interest in making people's lives as "transparent" as possible, putting as many "human-detecting" devices in people's homes as possible is precisely what you'd do. If this "smart floor" is cheap enough, you'll probably find it included, at some point, in many newly built houses. The only way you could truly "opt out" of that smart flooring would be to either have the entire flooring ripped out and replaced with passive flooring, or to cut off the electricity supply of the smart flooring (What if they can transmit electricity to it "wirelessly" however? Tesla thought/proved this was possible, no?)
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
intelligent enough to txt me at work, if only to say, "your cat has oncemore lost traction on the waxed hallway floor, and smashed head on into the book case as usual with predictably hillarious results."
Good people go to bed earlier.
We dont have floor!
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
'tremendous implications for home health technology.'"
Huh, 'home health' must mean no-knock search/arrest warrant.
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
This IS IBM after all, building a smarter world, smarter than the slaves who keep it running at any rate.
If you read some kind of print media while you poo (a magazine, a newspaper, the toilet paper itself), you are already being targeted by advertisers. How is this different?
"Excuse me sir or madam, have you fallen and can't get up?"
By Edgar Allan Poe.
Have gnu, will travel.
While there could be interesting applications of this, covering your floor with touch sensors is far too expensive to be practical.
As are Pepsi (mtn dew), Frito Lay (cheetos... wait, arent they Pepsi as well?) and Wizards of the Coast (somehow this has to be pepsi too....)
There are 10 types of people in the world. Those that understand this sig, and those that beat up people who do.
when you spill your drink all over it? In my experience, fancy-dancy electronics and liquids don't mi RCODE: 1001-02 Client disconnected from the connection.
There are 10 types of people in the world. Those that understand this sig, and those that beat up people who do.
Here are a few heavy items I sometimes carry and or wear;
20 pound biker jacket
40 pound chainmaille shirt
20 pound chainmaille kilt
backpack
boxes full of chainmaille
heavy suicases.
By wearing/carrying the above items in different combination my weight can vary by a hundred pounds.
How is this better than a dog? My dog 1) is 100% effective at detecting intruders; and 2) if I were to fall, he would come and lick me in the face.
I have had pressure-sensitive floor pads for years. You place them under the carpet. Inside them are strips of spring steel which contact each other under pressure.
They are very 60's , commonly used by shopkeepers to alert them when a customer entered. I got a few to alert me when someone was messing around my house. This was many years ago. The devices have long been replaced with other technologies.
So, would this be prior art?
( And I want to replace the whole shebang again... this time with HB100 modules. ).
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
But...how would it detect Dance Dance Revolution? My guess would be as an intruder having a heart attack.
"You know RivenAleem, you could afford to lose a few pounds"
Activate the steel plates blocking all exits, then releasing the trained attack hounds? Perhaps after, it can also deploy the cleaning robots.
The real lucrative market is of course home-confinement monitoring - a refinement of the ankle bracelet.
IBM still does cool things, but just like certain Holerith cards, they don't seem too troubled about how the tech is used after the sale.
being Floored...
"Let's go find some Turian and beat the shit out of him