Tuesday 9 October 2018

Automating shampoo dispensing

Are we ever going to get to a point with resource conservation where it would be beneficial to automate shampoo dispensing?

The problem I'm thinking about is that when you squeeze shampoo from the bottle to your hand, you are measuring by eye, which is less accurate that what we can achieve with machines. Getting feedback on too little shampoo is easy - the user requests another amount. But feedback on whether there was too much shampoo dispensed is more tricky. Perhaps human voice feedback? Or a camera with image recognition? Or analysis of the soapiness of the water entering the drain? Or some kind of glove that you wear whilst washing your hair that contains sensors?

Will the cost of soap outweigh the cost of the technology (potentially amortized over some years)?

More generally, how deeply do we expect technology to get into the small parts of our daily lives? How much measuring? How much automation?

Saturday 10 March 2018

Ad blocker for the real world - the end of out-of-home advertising

One of the great benefits I'm looking forward to when donning my AR glasses in the, hopefully not too distant, future is the software that I'm sure will quickly be developed allowing me to block out all out-of-home advertising.

Using AI/machine learning/image recognition every billboard can be detected, and it's contents changed to something I want to see, rather than something someone else wants me to see. It could be that the billboard itself is detected, or perhaps the content. Content detection could be through either machine learning techniques or crowd-sourcing, or a combination of the two.

It might even possible for my AR glasses to block TV advertising, and use noise cancelling technology so I don't have to hear them either.

I hope these technologies empower consumers to have a more balanced relationship with the brands that advertise to them.

Pooing in bags

When we flush faeces and urine into the drains we flush away valuable data. Data that is important for our own health, but also for medical research and for the early detection of transmissible diseases.

In the future I expect we will poo into bags and pee into pots, which are immediately sealed and taken by robots to automated laboratories.

Monday 1 January 2018

Rotating climbing wall with servo-controlled pins for holds

Rotating climbing walls already exist, but as far as I can see from my research, they are a fixed set of holds on a rotating surface (by fixed I mean that they don't change within one continuous climb).

It should be possible however to make a rotating climbing wall with servo/solenoid-controlled pins for holds. These holds can come in and out of the surface, changing the configuration dynamically whilst the user is on the other side of the board. Hence the user has a continuous non-repeating climb.

The holds could be made from the same material as normal climbing holds, and could be configured with various shapes. It may be possible (and necessary) to have a door that covers the hole for the hold to retract into, so the user isn't tempted to use the entrance of the hole as a hold.