While riding in a car this morning, heard the discussion on radio about the extreme weight of schoolbooks the kids are carrying nowadays. Readers from countries where there are lockers in schools or those countries that have dispensed altogether of all the heavy books in favour of a laptop for each child would be amazed with all of the fuss. There were many callers to the radio station giving their views on the matter but one caller in particular was interesting, she introduced herself as from one of the foremost universities of the country and she was part of a team of researchers which have studied the problem in particular. What interested me most is how so very excited she was, almost breathlessly so and the fact that she said that the solution her team had devised was awaiting (this is where she was getting breathless) ‘commercialization’ (now we know what that is), and that solution takes form in a schoolbag that would signal if the bag was carrying load that is heavier than what would be considered healthy, which she put at 40% (or is it 30%, i can’t remember) of the now slouching child’s bodyweight. Pressed upon by the radio presenters on how would that help, she said that then some of the books in the bag would be carried by the child using their hands because she said that according to her group’s research, if the books that was carried by a child using their hands in front of them, it would not hurt their backs. Of course anyone that had tried to carry a burden in front of them would agree, not. By saying what she had said, a question would crop up, why even bother with backpacks? have the students carry their books in bags like those used to carry groceries. Actually if she had said that by carrying some books using the child’s hands, the burden that the child was hauling would be balanced and therefore much more comfortable to carry, I would have agreed with her, but that would have made the backpack her group was designing and trying to ‘commercialize’ unsellable and redundant, because what you should be doing is not asked the people to buy another new bag that your making, what you would do is tell the children to just simply take some books out if their bags was too heavy without waiting for a bag to tell them so, you know, use their brains and carry some of the books with their hands. What would actually sell was a pack that would be worn like a vest with the compartments in the front AND the back but that would not be hi-tech wouldn’t it, the weight the child would be carrying would still be heavy and I think there’s prior art in that potential patent. ‘commercialization’, pah!
.
I , while impatiently waiting for that researcher to finish her story, actually thought that what they had devised was an application that would run on a smartphone (either based on Google Android or that hip Apple Iphone) and would use its camera to take a picture of the child carrying that gigantic load and the app would know how to differentiate which part of the object is the child and which is the school bag, then using the magic of computing would analyse the volume of each item, then would work out their weights by using a formula like [volume of child * average density of child = child's weight & volume of bag * density of paper + average weight of stationery = rough estimate of bag's weight], the user of the software, either a teacher or a concerned parent, would be at the school’s entrance scanning the incoming children. They would then know which child is carrying more than what they should. The child’s syllabus and schedules could be studied to find out actually if it could be rearranged or if any of the books that the child is carrying could be left at home, which being the heaviest thing in a proper schoolbag would be the text book or an unconventional one of those thick novels the kids are reading nowadays.
.
Well back to what I’m actually thinking, is it like this? monetization first, cook up a product and make the research fit with the needs for that product. What’s the rush to get rich? Oh man if I’m the presiding professor to that group’s project, they’d have some splainin’ to do.
.
Back to that smartphone app, it’s actually was inspired by a video i remember I had watched some time ago, the video was demonstrating a program that had the capability to make a 3 dimensional model from a video clip showing a few sides of an object.
There are software actually that is already in use in industrial manufacturing that could differentiate between one object from another.
That formula to come up with the weight is just common sense.
Advertisement
