An open design dossier for ending injury from elderly falls — given away.
Falls are the #1 injury killer of adults 65+: ~41,400 US deaths/yr, ~3M ER visits, ~319,000 hip fractures, ~$80B in annual cost — and much of the morbidity comes from the "long lie" (down alone, unable to rise). Every technology needed to change this exists today, scattered across journals, labs, and shelves. Nobody has assembled it. This dossier is the assembly.
Nothing charges without a catch, nothing falls uncaught, and nobody lies on the floor alone.
Concretely: a device may never apply force without verified purchase; every fall past the point of no return is caught (softened, steered, cushioned) rather than resisted; every landing triggers assessment, help, and get-up assistance.
| File | Contents |
|---|---|
catch-cane-design.md |
The flagship: an autonomous cane that predicts instability, verifies its grip before it pushes, buys recovery time, catches unavoidable falls (controlled-yield strut + airbag trigger), then helps the person up and calls for help. Three-band staged autonomy (green/yellow/red), purchase-interlock foot, thin safety kernel. |
invisible-armor-design.md |
The ensemble: insoles, belt, backpack hub, collar, ear-clips, pants — a coordinated wardrobe sharing one gait model and one law. Includes the two-strategies physics frame and the insole-first roadmap. |
EVIDENCE.md |
The state of the art with citations: epidemiology, fall-timing science, airbag performance, gyroscopic balance assist, sensory augmentation, prior art. |
HANDOFF.md |
The gift letter: who this is for, verified receiving organizations, and how to take it up. |
LICENSE.md |
Open license (CC BY-SA 4.0 for these documents) and the defensive-publication rationale. |
super-slinky-design.md |
Origin appendix: the design session that derived the catch principles from first physics (a falling slinky). Kept for the derivation and the honest reasoning trail. |
This is a design-stage dossier: concept of operations, system architecture, physics grounding, timing budgets, safety law, module specifications, and evidence base. It is not manufacturing CAD, firmware, or a clinical protocol. It is written so that a capable engineering team — a university lab, a nonprofit R&D group, an agetech accelerator cohort — can execute from it without needing its authors.
Key design facts already grounded in published evidence:
- Pre-impact fall detection: 280–450 ms lead time is achieved science
- Wearable airbag inflation: 75–80 ms, commercial
- Airbag-class protection cuts peak hip force from >3100 N (fracture range) to ~1200 N
- Sub-sensory vibrating insoles improve elderly balance (The Lancet, 2003)
- Noisy galvanic vestibular stimulation improves elderly balance with hours of carryover (Scientific Reports)
- Trunk-mounted gyroscopic balance assistance works (TU Delft GyBAR/GyroPack)
- The timing budget closes. Nothing here requires an invention — only integration under one safety law.
The designers have no desire to commercialize this. The event that kills 41,000 people a year has no company or institution whose entire mission is that event. This dossier is published openly so that the core designs are permanent prior art — buildable by anyone, lockable by no one.
Build it. Improve it. Keep it open. — 2026