Google told me that today would have been Alessandro Volta's 270th birthday. I wish Count Volta a Happy Birthday and hope that he would have enjoyed this blog about powering an automobile with the sun's rays. He invented an early form of the electric battery called the "electrophorus." Count Volta, a man after my own heart, was quoted as saying: "The language of experiment is more authoritative than any reasoning: facts can destroy our ratiocination—not vice versa." Ah, yes, I agree that the truth is best when conveyed with data.
But, how does one go about envisioning the future? I've blogged in the past about bringing the future to the present. Well, I recently visited Kaiser's Garfield Innovation Center, where Kaiser works to bring the gap between an innovative idea and reality. One of the innovations on display was a Nissan Leaf, which represented a future where a car would autonomous drive to an individual with chronic heart failure in the middle of a possible medical emergency. The vehicle could be equipped with sensors so that the medical intervention would begin in the vehicle as it drove the patient to the hospital. Well, many parts of this scenario are already under development. For example, the autonomous driving Leaf is on its way...in 2020. In addition, Patent US 8874301 B1 Autonomous vehicle with driver presence and physiological monitoring from Ford Global Technologies details an autonomous vehicle that would shut down and execute an emergency response mode if built-in or driver supplied biometric sensors detected "any serious condition/deviation in biologic signals."
The pieces are all out there. We just need visionaries to bring it to the present and so I ask: WWCVD? What would Count Volta do?
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