When the phone falls from your hand, it seems that everything is stopped. You can hear your heartbeat – there is silence around, all cognitive activities stop – you seem to watch your $700 phone slowly spin down onto the concrete floor. How will it land? Will you be lucky this time? Or is this all true? However, if you put this protective case on your phone, you will see it play a few times and finally land gently on the ground.
This “active shock-absorbing” protective case is a bit like the “airbag” of a mobile phone, and is the brainchild of Philip Frenzel, an engineer at Aalen University in Germany. His ideas have been awarded the highest award by the German Society for Mechatronics, which evaluates the design proposals submitted by students from all over Germany. Click on the video here and you can see how he explained its development process.
Like me, Franzell does not like to use the ugly protective shell to affect the beauty of the phone, but he does not like to inevitably break the screen of the phone because of the pursuit of beauty. So why can’t there be a protective case that only opens when the phone is dangerous? So he began to study hard. His early development of the activation device was a sensor that could be used to detect when the phone fell and then activate the next step.
But what is the next step? Franzell continued to revise and perfect, his initial idea was to install real airbags on the phone. But that idea was not practical, and several later solutions proved to be impractical. In the end, Franzell’s inspiration came. Can’t use soft materials, why not consider elastic materials?
As you can see above, Franzell thinks of eight fine metal rings, which are usually flat in the phone case. However, once released, they suddenly pop up and roll up, protecting the edges of the phone from direct impact and greatly reducing the impact. In contrast, without this protective case, the phone will directly hit the concrete floor.
When you pick up your phone (hopefully not damaged), you just need to retract the spring into the phone case for later use. Of course, some people may think that when the mobile phone is still in the pocket, once the metal ring is bounced, the ideal situation will make you feel embarrassed, and the worst case will make the body hurt. Some people think that there are several ways to solve this problem – for example, activate the proximity sensor of the phone, you will know whether the phone is in a pocket or a bag.
Franzell has patented the technology and even printed a prominent logo on the T-shirt. Therefore, this product is really going to be on the market. The next stop is to log in to the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter. If you have more technology updated news, you can also write for us technology guest posts.
