Earlier this month, Amazon won approval for a patent that would deploy an airbag system for smartphones. Many vehicle airbag systems rely on accelerometers to deploy the airbag. These accelerometers are the same type of accelerometers built into smartphones and an increasing array of devices and used for things like screen rotation. It is conceivable that eventually a wide array of device will have airbag-like protection mechanisms
I’m a big fan of MEMs and have written frequently about the sensorization of consumer tech. I recently came across two interesting applications. The first is Twine and the second is GreenGoose.
Twine is a “wireless sensor block tightly integrated with a cloud-based service.” Twine has WiFi, an internal temperature sensor and accelerometer (for vibration and orientation detection). You can also add additional external sensors. You then set the rules which in turn trigger messages. When a rule is triggered, a message is sent. Something like, “WHEN the moisture sensor gets dry THEN text “the plant needs water.”
GreenGoose produces a variety of sensor kits for things like children toothbrushes. The sensors communicate with a base station which then causes a playful, dancing monkey on the related app to respond.