Businesses generally intend to enter pre-established markets like restaurants and bars or manufacture the most used products to gain maximum profits. But some of them want to establish an entirely new market. Risk and boldness enable innovators to bring a change in the world, even though all of them don’t succeed.
A few business patents surprise the world almost every year with strange, weird, or funny products, which have been happening over the years. The year 2022 also saw a few strange patents, which are appreciable, regardless if they receive success and glory or find it hard to get a customer base somewhat ahead of time.
Three Strange Business Patents of 2022
1. Machine-Learning Posture Correction Garment
Artificial intelligence is everywhere around us nowadays. Soon, you don’t have to tell your kid repeatedly to sit straight, as AI will do it for you.
Chinese Academy of Sciences innovated new tech to correct wrong postures with fabric. The futuristic fabric combines conductive fibers and nylon, and these materials are incorporated into a shirt adding tiny sensors. The wearer’s posture will be recorded in the real-time data collected by the self-powered fabric. Then, a machine-learning program will immediately offer feedback on the appropriate sitting postures.
Posture is essential for good health. Poor postures often lead to complex diseases, which will not limit to bone problems only. Thus the posture-correcting wearable is handy despite being one of the strange businesses of the year.
The shirt doesn’t even need charging. The regular movement of the wearer supplies energy using TENGs or triboelectric nanogenerators. The shirt is stretchable, washable, and durable, allowing long-term posture monitoring. The monitoring is reliable, too, with sensors placed to connect to the cervical, lumbar and thoracic spine.
2. Salt-Enhancing Chopsticks
Several studies have shown that consuming excessive sodium is a common habit and may cause serious cardiovascular problems. Almost all Americans would love to have the taste of a spoonful of salt in a small amount.
Kirin Holdings of Japan developed a chopstick, collaborating with Meiji University, to enhance the taste of salt. The chopstick enhances the salty taste of any food allowing people to consume less salt. So, a salt-enhancing chopstick is one of the strange examples of patents in this year’s business.
The technology used in the chopstick for taste enhancement is a mini-computer worn on wrists and electrical stimulation. A light current from the chopstick sends the sodium ions to the mouth from the food to create a sensation of salt.
Meiji University conducted a test on thirty-six people between 40 and 65 years of age. Those people experienced a salt taste enhancement of up to 1.5 times more than the original salt taste of the food. The food samples included both regular food and food with 30% reduced salt. The slightly electrified chopstick made the less salty food taste saltier than the regular food.
3. Candy-Dispensing Computer Accessories
It’s not possible to talk about strange business patents, excluding candy-dispensing computer accessories, and they can’t be included in the list of strange patents of this year because of their expiration in 2017.
It is a battery-powered candy dispenser for personal computers. For example, if a student uses an educational software application and solves a problem, the computer peripheral rewards him with candy.
Anthony Vandenberg, its inventor, proposes the machine like the gumball machine but doesn’t have pocket change need. The dispenser offers candies, which are individually wrapped, to the single user solving a problem on the personal computer.
The dispenser’s components are an upper and lower compartment made of transparent plastic, a suction cup, a threaded cap of transparent plastic, a central controller to monitor the whole process and operate the candy dispensing action, and a photo-sensor device attached to the monitor to generate signals among many other components.
The dispenser’s fundamental goal was to motivate students in their studies by rewarding them with candies whenever they solved a problem.
