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TV Shoes

Published by marco on

 Smart shoes decide on television time (New Scientist) covers yet another brilliant idea from Britain, in which a home’s television usage can be keyed to a counter in a pair of sneakers. As with many other things British, it has a totally lame, weird name that doesn’t make any sense to anyone outside of Britain: “Square Eyes”. I honestly have no idea what that’s supposed to mean.

As with all kooky ideas that will never work, it starts from the best intentions: getting kids to both eat less and watch less TV. Let’s get a description of the thing first, so you can see just how well-thought out it is:

“The shoes … contain an electronic pressure sensor and a tiny computer chip to record how many steps the wearer has taken in a day. A wireless transmitter passes the information to a receiver connected to a television, and this decides how much evening viewing time the wearer deserves, based on the day’s exertions.”

I’m sure the idea works perfectly in inventor Gillian Swan’s world, but in the real world, populated by clever little brats out to make their parents’ lives miserable, it’s going to flop hard, not least because it looks like it will totally make every shoe look orthopedic. If the kid doesn’t figure out how to hack it or disable the receiver or download a kit that reconfigures the regulator, s/he can still make other people’s lives miserable. The next natural question is how much time does a kid get and how much does s/he have to walk to get it?

“Health experts suggest that a child take 12,000 steps each day and watch no more than two hours of television. So, every 100 steps recorded by the Square Eyes shoes equates to precisely one minute of TV time.”

This is the kind of ass-backwards approach to rearing children that’s preordained to backfire. The richer kids will simply use their massive allowances to pay other kids to run up their TV time. Others will simply hang out at their friend’s houses, where the TV doesn’t turn itself off. But probably the easiest way to thwart the TV restriction is to simply not wear the shoes while watching. Unless, this is only to prevent a child from watching their own private TV. Otherwise, the parents’ TV wouldn’t work either.

So, basically, this device will prevent a child from watching their own set. If it’s hooked up to the one and only set, what happens when the kid’s already used up his share of TV time (perhaps having accrued a grand total of 15 minutes by walking down to a gas station to buy a gallon of coke)? Why, he’ll come in and sit in the living room with his parents when they’re trying to watch their show. Click. Off goes the TV.

A couple of days of that and that device and shoes are sitting in the trash.