Coming to your commercial break at the 2014 Super Bowl at Met-Life Stadium - the automated compliance robot!

Not really.

I wanted to briefly touch on safety and risk in the automotive business as a consumer.

I was driving my car yesterday and needed to stop and get mail at my in-laws. Their mailbox is at the end of a private road which then leads to their very long, steep driveway. I step out of my car, grab the mail, attempt not to die on the ice, and jump back in. In all of its wrongness, I decided that the private road and driveway were "safe enough" and didn't buckle my seatbelt. Enter my car's safety feature - the blinking light and annoying alarm.

Of course - the blinking light is the visual signal of something gone awry, and the alarm annoys your ear off to accomplish the same goal until resolved. I've heard and seen the alarm enough getting in and out of the car, but I made a small discovery. Because of the amount of snow on the road, I slowed down to a much lower speed than I normally travel. Curiously enough, the blinking light and annoying alarm changed - no alarm, solid light - once I drove under 8-10 MPH. Being the nerd that I am, I validated that I had observed that correctly. Speeding up to engage the blinking and alarm, slowing down to disengage the alarm and stop the blinking.

Maybe I've simply never observed it before, but I found it interesting that the risk level of someone not wearing a seatbelt below 8-10 MPH necessitated a less intense alarm than someone not wearing a seatbelt above 8-10 MPH. Of course, it makes a lot of sense to design the alarm in that manner, but it wasn't ever something I actively thought about outside of medical devices. How professionally Narcissistic of me!

Medical devices must comply with standards and guidances on how to develop and tier alarm systems on medical devices. Now I know that technique is employed elsewhere.

-RTK

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