Personalized Seatbelts

from the everyone's-got-different-safety-needs dept

These days it seems like everything is personalized. Even Google and phishing scams are going the personalized route. So why not things in the physical world as well? First up, is the effort by Nissan to personalize a car's safety systems. It's an ingenious idea -- recognizing that different body types may respond differently to seatbelts and airbags in a collision. So the system requires the user to do a quick finger scan, to designate their bone density, and then adjusts the settings on the seatbelt and airbags accordingly -- to make them less likely to, well, crush your bones. Of course, it must be a pain to reset the safety settings of a car each time you drive it -- and it's not clear how the system deals with multiple passengers in a car. Either way, though, it's an interesting step forward in automotive safety.