prevention

3 Articles

The Science Behind Making Buildings Comfortably Non-Combustible

February 11, 2025 by 34 Comments

Although the most fire-resistant building is likely a windowless, concrete bunker, this tends to be not the vibe that most home owners go for. This is why over the years construction of buildings in areas prone to bush- and wildfires – i.e. an uncontrolled fire in an area with combustible vegetation – has adapted to find a happy medium between a building that you’d enjoy living in and a building that will not instantly combust the moment an ember from a nearby wildfire gently touches down upon any part of it.

To achieve this feat, the primary means include keeping said combustible vegetation and similar away from the building, and to make the house as resistant to ember attacks as possible. That this approach is effective has been demonstrated over the course of multiple wildfires in California during the past years, whereby houses constructed more recently with these features had a much higher chance of making it through the event unscathed.

Naturally, the devil is in the details, which is why for example the Australian standard for construction in bushfire-prone areas (AS 3959, last updated in 2018, 2009 version PDF) is rather extensive and heavy on details, including multiple Bushfire Attack Level (BAL) ratings that define risk areas and legally required mitigation measures. So what does it take exactly to survive a firestorm bearing down on your abode?

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Fighting Dehydration One Sip At A Time

September 2, 2017 by 22 Comments

Humans don’t survive long without water, and most people walk around in a chronic state of mild dehydration even if they have access to plenty of drinking water. It’s hard to stay properly hydrated, and harder still to keep track of your intake, which is the idea behind this water-intake monitoring IoT drinking straw.

Dehydration is a particularly acute problem in the elderly, since the sense of thirst tends to diminish with age. [jflaschberger]’s Hackaday Prize entry seeks to automate the tedious and error-prone job of recording fluid intake, something that caregivers generally have to take care of by eyeballing that half-empty glass and guessing. The HydrObserve uses a tiny turbine flowmeter that can mount to a drinking straw or water bottle cap. A Hall sensor in the turbine sends flow data to a Cypress BLE SoC module, which totalizes the volume sipped and records a patient identifier. A caregiver can then scan the data from the HydrObserve at the end of the day for charting and to find out if anyone is behind on their fluids.

There are problems to solve, not least being the turbine, which doesn’t appear to be food safe. But that’s a small matter that shouldn’t stand in the way of an idea as good as this one. We’ve seen a lot of good entries in the Assistive Technology phase of the 2017 Hackaday Prize, like a walker that works on stairs or sonic glasses for the blind. There are only a couple of days left in this phase — got any bright ideas?

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Exoskeleton Aims To Prevent Falls For Seniors

May 17, 2017 by 12 Comments

When we think of exoskeletons, we tend to think along comic book lines: mechanical suits bestowing superhero strength upon the villain. But perhaps more practical uses for exoskeletons exists: restoring the ability to walk, for instance, or as in the case of these exoskeleton shorts, preventing hip fractures by detecting and correcting falls before they happen.

Falls and the debilitating injuries that can result are a cruel fact of life for the elderly, and anything that can potentially mitigate them could be a huge boon to public health. Falls often boil down to loss of balance from slipping, whether it be a loose rug, a patch of ice, or even the proverbial banana peel. The “Active Pelvic Orthosis” developed by [Vito Monaco] and colleagues seeks to sense slips and correct them by applying the correct torque to the hip joints. Looking a little bulky in their prototype form and still tethered to an external computer, the shorts have motors with harmonic drives and angle sensors for each hip, plus accelerometers to detect the kinematic signature of a slip. The researchers discovered that forcing the leg that slipped forward while driving the stable leg back helped reduce the possibility of a fall. The video below shows the shorts in action preventing falls on a slip-inducing treadmill.

At the Hackaday Unconference in Pasadena, we heard from [Raul Ocampo] on his idea for autonomous robots to catch falling seniors. Perhaps wearing the robot will end up being a better idea.

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