Week 5

Since we were unable to do our initial presentation of our project last week due to having all our selected ideas rejected as they were too complicated or simply not good enough, we made sure to have our initial presentation and our initial report finished by the end of this week to submit before the due date.

We presented our research and ideas showing what exists in the current seat belt safety system. This including a buzzer in the newer cars if the driver isn't wearing the seat belt and a warning light for if the passenger and/or driver isn't wearing their seat belt. We also showed how our research could possibly improve this current system and increase the amount of people wearing this system. 

Next we have to research on all our potential inputs for the next demonstration. This project was mutually named "No Seat Belt, No Drive" by myself and my partner Abhinav. We had to choose a supervisor and discuss our idea with him next. We chose Simon to be our project supervisor as being a student himself, we thought it would be a more comfortable environment when discussing anything and everything with him including our progress through out the semester.

Week 4

Our initial presentation was due on the Friday of week 4 and we still had not thought of a viable idea for our technology project and we were at square one again however we suddenly remembered how safety is still a major issue and there are still a lot of fatalities due to people being careless about their seat belt.

We decided to dig up some statistics, according to CDC.gov (2011), 

• Adults age 18-34 are less likely to wear seat belts than adults 35 or older. (CDC, 2010, unpublished data).
• Men are 10% less likely to wear seat belts than women. (CDC, 2010, unpublished data).
• Adults who live in rural areas are 10% less likely to wear seat belts (78% use) than adults who live in urban and suburban areas (87% use). (CDC, 2010, unpublished data).
• Seat belt use is lower in states with secondary enforcement seat belt laws or no seat belt laws (79%) compared to states with primary enforcement laws (88%).
• Seat belts reduce serious crash-related injuries and deaths by about 50%.

We were also able to find out that wearing a seat belt reduces your chance of death or serious injury by 40%, (Ministry of Transport NZ, 2014). 

So we thought of a way of somewhat forcing people to wear a seat belt (better safe than sorry right?). What if we research a system in which the car will lose throttle completely once the vehicle goes over a set speed without wearing their system. Say hypothetically 20 kph, to allow for moving the car around in parking lots and not accounting when reversing as the law in many country states that you are not legally required to wear a seat belt when reversing a vehicle. 

There is still a chance that people can put the seatbelt behind their back when sitting on the seat and buckling it to avoid the speed restrictions however our motto is to not aimed to save stupid and/ignorant people who want to avoid wearing seat belt at all cost (death or serious injury included), it is aimed to save the careless and people who sometimes simply forget to wear the seat belt.

Week 3

Week 3 was mainly the week we finalize our project and start researching on it however we were still confused with the ideas as whatever we thought of was either not a good or it was good for our next semester paper "innovative technology" or it was too hard to do in 10 weeks of this paper. This was all discussed with Roman Kudin our lecturer for the semester.

The ideas I discussed with Roman were as followed :- a) Toaster/Sandwich maker in the car for when people get late to work/uni etc they don't get enough nutrition from breakfast. b) Remote controlling an actual car to practice drifting with cameras mounted on the car to practice without actually being in the car. c) Third idea was to figure out a way to transfer the braking torques from the rear brakes to front brakes to be able to do burnouts on a motorbike, as from personal experience when I tried to do it on my own motorbike there wasn't enough braking power on the front wheel so the bike would keep moving and I was unsuccessful to do a burnout on my motorbike.

After these ideas were failed, we went back home to think of more ideas.

Week 1 and 2

I had missed Weeks 1 and 2 of the class as I wasn't feeling well however I was told that the classes were fairly straightforward consisting of induction to the course. We were told to get into pairs and I paired up with Abhinav Singh Mankotia for the group. We were also told to start thinking about what projects we can work on and research into them.

We were also told to blog every week to show what we learned. I realize mine are a bit late but that is because of my health during the initial weeks. I am determined to catch up on them asap.