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The Dust of Gods and Small People
Jul. 30th, 2019 05:58 pmSo, some fellow from Indianapolis baked his twin infants by leaving them in the car all day. As generally bloodthirsty as I am toward lawbreakers, I couldn't convict or even begin to blame this guy, because this is something we force as a society. It's not natural to put a baby into the back seat out of sight. The natural thing to do is to place an infant where it can be watched, either in the passenger seat if driving alone, or in the care of one of the passengers otherwise.
The reason we have well-funded child safety organizations lobbying for the infant seat in the back is that a child who dies in a collision costs the insurance company. A child who's forgotten and roasts to death in a locked car doesn't. That's cynical and nasty, and I feel kind of icky believing it, but I think that at the bottom of it all, that's the truth of the matter. You certainly don't see the child safety advocates going into Holy Crusade mode over this like they did over the car seats, even though it ought not to be *that* hard to come up with a cheap technological modification to the baby seats to help remind people.
Perhaps an alarm with a accelerometer that's armed by fastening the child's restraint, that then calls your phone if the seat experiences no forward motion for five minutes or so. That shouldn't be hard, and shouldn't cost a whole lot either.
Or, you could prolly use the accelerometer that's already in the phone. Fastening the restraint makes the buckle send a near-field chirp to the phone to activate the app. Once the phone's accelerometer sees no automobile-grade acceleration for five minutes, and the phone hasn't seen an 'unfastened' chirp from the buckle, it triggers the alarm. Going that route, you could also have the phone call someone else if the alarm isn't seen to within five minutes or so. By putting the hardware in the buckle, old seats could be easily upgraded.
On reflection, it could be done even more cheaply and easily. Belt buckle gives a near field chirp to the app on the phone or tablet when it's fastened. The fastened buckle gives a keep-alive ping to the phone every minute or so. The buckle disarms the app's alarm with another chirp when it's unfastened. If the phone is taken out of near field range without first disarming the alarm, then after a minute or so the alarm sounds. You don't need an accelerometer, so it will work with cheap phones too.
You could perhaps use TCP/IP instead of near field, and have the alarm triggered by a drop in the strength of the signal, showing that the phone had been removed from the vicinity of the seat without disarming the alarm. That would require the user to manually arm it for each use, though. Near field has a better failsafe.
*****
I may have found a minor bit of old-time racing trivia that no-one else knows. One of my favourite old drivers was Mauri Rose, who won the Indianapolis 500 three times, while driving on a part-time, amateur basis. Whilst poking through the archives of the Columbus Dispatch (he grew up here), I found a 1928 traffic court report that detailed a fine levelled on a "Morris Rose". It's his address, so there's no doubt it was him. It's for the relatively minor-sounding offense of "not having a working muffler", but the interesting part is that the judge fined him $10 and costs, where everyone else got off with $5, or even just court costs with no fine. I have to think that whatever he did was rather worse than it sounds in print. I'm left to wonder if he was testing out a race car on the public roads? He was racing local tracks at that age, and working on his own cars (and was already a local sensation - advertisements for races list "Maurice Rose" as a confirmed entrant, along with lists of other luminaries long forgotten). Further research is called for.
The reason we have well-funded child safety organizations lobbying for the infant seat in the back is that a child who dies in a collision costs the insurance company. A child who's forgotten and roasts to death in a locked car doesn't. That's cynical and nasty, and I feel kind of icky believing it, but I think that at the bottom of it all, that's the truth of the matter. You certainly don't see the child safety advocates going into Holy Crusade mode over this like they did over the car seats, even though it ought not to be *that* hard to come up with a cheap technological modification to the baby seats to help remind people.
Perhaps an alarm with a accelerometer that's armed by fastening the child's restraint, that then calls your phone if the seat experiences no forward motion for five minutes or so. That shouldn't be hard, and shouldn't cost a whole lot either.
Or, you could prolly use the accelerometer that's already in the phone. Fastening the restraint makes the buckle send a near-field chirp to the phone to activate the app. Once the phone's accelerometer sees no automobile-grade acceleration for five minutes, and the phone hasn't seen an 'unfastened' chirp from the buckle, it triggers the alarm. Going that route, you could also have the phone call someone else if the alarm isn't seen to within five minutes or so. By putting the hardware in the buckle, old seats could be easily upgraded.
On reflection, it could be done even more cheaply and easily. Belt buckle gives a near field chirp to the app on the phone or tablet when it's fastened. The fastened buckle gives a keep-alive ping to the phone every minute or so. The buckle disarms the app's alarm with another chirp when it's unfastened. If the phone is taken out of near field range without first disarming the alarm, then after a minute or so the alarm sounds. You don't need an accelerometer, so it will work with cheap phones too.
You could perhaps use TCP/IP instead of near field, and have the alarm triggered by a drop in the strength of the signal, showing that the phone had been removed from the vicinity of the seat without disarming the alarm. That would require the user to manually arm it for each use, though. Near field has a better failsafe.
*****
I may have found a minor bit of old-time racing trivia that no-one else knows. One of my favourite old drivers was Mauri Rose, who won the Indianapolis 500 three times, while driving on a part-time, amateur basis. Whilst poking through the archives of the Columbus Dispatch (he grew up here), I found a 1928 traffic court report that detailed a fine levelled on a "Morris Rose". It's his address, so there's no doubt it was him. It's for the relatively minor-sounding offense of "not having a working muffler", but the interesting part is that the judge fined him $10 and costs, where everyone else got off with $5, or even just court costs with no fine. I have to think that whatever he did was rather worse than it sounds in print. I'm left to wonder if he was testing out a race car on the public roads? He was racing local tracks at that age, and working on his own cars (and was already a local sensation - advertisements for races list "Maurice Rose" as a confirmed entrant, along with lists of other luminaries long forgotten). Further research is called for.
