Tech

For over 30 years, Barry Fox has trawled the world's weird and wonderful patent applications each week, digging out the most exciting, intriguing and even terrifying new ideas. His column, Invention, is now available exclusively online. Please send us your feedback.

Shock tactics

Patents filed by an Israeli inventor Amit Weisman and US company Yardeni Associates of Connecticut make scary reading for nervous travellers.

Airport security guards already use hand-held electromagnetic wands to detect metal hidden under clothing. The same wand can also sniff for traces of the gases some explosives emit into the air.

If the passenger is a suicide bomber who realises the wand has found something, the guard might not have enough time to pull out handcuffs or a gun. So the new wand will have a hidden secret - a transformer which steps the detector's battery power up to 100 kilovolts and feeds it to disguised metal electrodes at the end of the wand.

If the wand gives a silent warning of explosives, the guard can then subtly slide the pads onto the passenger's neck or hands and press a shock button. The patent reassures that the effect is "temporary and reversible".

So an innocent traveller who "happened to have a significant amount of metal on his person or happened to treat explosives legally" should wake up shaken but unharmed.

Read the shocking wand patent here (pdf file).

Speaking up

Ever struggled to hear what's being said on the phone while you are in a noisy car or a rowdy pub? Someone at the Philips research labs in Eindhoven obviously has because the Dutch company is filing world patents on a new way of making speech more easily understood in noisy surroundings.

In everyday speech the hissy consonants - like "s" and "sh" - are more important for intelligibility than the vowels - like "a", "e" and "i". But the vowels are usually louder than the consonants.

So if the overall level of speech is amplified to try to make it stand out from background noise, the vowels become much too loud, overload the ear and drown out the consonants. The words become even harder to understand.

The new technology from Philips continually - and very rapidly - increases the amplification as the background noise level rises, but treats the vowels and consonants differently. The weaker, higher frequencies that form the consonants are amplified by about twice as much as the louder, lower frequency vowels - making the words more intelligible.

The selective boost system can be built into cellphones, laptop PCs and TV sets, says the company.

Read the consonant-boosting patent here (pdf file).

Chameleon-phone

The cellphone industry is always looking for new must-have features to encourage people to junk their existing phones and buy new ones. Sony Ericsson's latest idea is to sell phones which automatically change the way they behave, depending on the time, date and place.

For example, the wallpaper display on the screen shows pumpkins when the phone's calendar sees the date is Halloween, and Christmas puddings on December 25th. Network roaming, or GPS, can tell a phone what country it is in, so the ring-tone might change to a reggae tune as the plane touches down in Jamaica, for example.

A restaurant could use short-range Bluetooth signals to deliver the specials menu direct to the phone's screen, and a cinema or church could use Bluetooth to switch it to silent mode. Stockbrokers could enable an option to display the latest share prices every 10 minutes and golfers could use continually updated weather forecasts for wallpaper.

Priority coding lets some automated controls override user settings. So if you are a golfing stockbroker praying in church for sunshine during a wet Christmas in Jamaica, the phone won't interrupt the sermon with a burst of Bob Marley.

Read the location-aware cellphone patent here.

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