Japanese Car Seat Can Tell Who Is Sitting On It

A new kind of car seat developed by the Advanced Institute of Industrial Technology inTokyo is able to identify the person who is sitting on it. The seat works by using a system of 360 pressure sensors, which through their combined effort can apparently remember what it feels like to be sat on by you as opposed to anyone a little bit thinner or fatter. It seems like it would be a pretty inaccurate affair, but tests have shown that it has a 98% percent recognition rate, which is pretty good considering what part of you these electronics have to interface with.

Of course, it’s not just the pressure sensors that are doing the work. All the data gets sent back to a laptop where the individal sensor data is aggregated into a reading of your specific hindquarters. This pressure map is then what’s used as the “key.” It may seem fairly trivial, but the goal of the technology is to add one more layer of security to cars, and I suppose it couldn’t hurt if it really does work as well as 98%. Test data or not, I have a hard time imagining this in a pratical scenario. Sure, you might generate a unique pressure map when you’re sitting one way, but it just seems like there are a lot of variables. On the upside, such a mechanism would also be able to warn you if you’re gaining weight, by refusing to turn on the car and forcing you to hoof it and get some exercise for once.

(via TechCrunch)

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