A year ago, at a party, one of my friends (who was dizzy
after stepping off
a motorized, rideable beaver) fell over, and was only
saved from hitting
her head on the concrete floor by another friend being in
the right place to
catch her.
To improve public safety, then, I propose the airbag
missile. Airbag
missiles are to be emplaced at various strategic locations
around areas
where the ground is hard and the probability of people
falling is high.
The launcher can use a slingshot, a launch tube for use
with the missile's
rocket or with compressed air, or some other launch
mechanism. When
surveillance cameras (or nearby robots) detect a human
falling over, they
send a message and the interpreted image (i.e. an
internal representation
of what the neural net that detects the fall perceives) to
the missile. The
missile then uses this to match with what it sees, and
continue to track the
faller. (A simple image match wouldn't work because the
perspectives
would be different, so they need to match the perceived
attributes of the
faller such as location, height, and clothing.) When the
missile reaches its
target it deploys an airbag into the space between the
faller and the patch
of ground where they would otherwise fall.
Version 2 can also detect falls of valuable, fragile
inanimate objects as
well as impending impacts between humans and moving
equipment. It also
supports connecting with potential fallers' phones and
wearable devices for
more reliable fall detection.
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