Have you experienced to drop your phone, slip it out of your hands and finally spoil your phone? Well, the Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has a solution for us: Airbags for phones and other portable devices. Or springs … or a propulsion system.
A patent application which was made public last year listed Bezos and Amazon VP Greg Hart as the inventors of “a system and method for protecting devices from impact damage.”
It starts with a safety monitoring system that would use a gyroscope, camera, infrared beam, radar or other sensors to detect such things as motion, orientation and distance from other objects — then determine in a split second if the device is at risk of damage from impact.
One of the idea is to embed one or more small airbags inside the phone which would instantly inflate if the device is at risk of damage from a fall. The monitoring system could either detect which side of the phone will hit the ground, and deploy the airbag there, or pop airbags out of multiple sides of the device. The patent application also suggested the possibility of reorienting the device in the air, by expelling gas, so that it lands on the side where an airbag is deployed.
In another example cited in the application, springs would be deployed instead of an airbag.
The patent filing was originally submitted in February 2010, but just became public in December last year. We will wait and see if any of this ever becomes as reality.
Read more:
http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/technolog/airbag-your-smartphone-amazons-bezos-floats-idea-121497
