design idea - safety syringe

I've been playing around with ways to make simple everyday things safer.  Whilst looking at how needles are disposed I wondered why the lid couldn't be made into a disposing feature. 

When the lid is placed back over the needle and firmly pushed on it locks, making the needle safe and the two parts very difficult to separate.  The assembly can then be safely removed from the syringe and disposed and a new needle and lid fitted by pushing the syringe into the needle whilst holding onto its collar.

design idea - improved dust pipe

A quick bit of work with the saw and the design prototype has been improved.  It does give advantages over the dust mask as your lips create a seal around the tube so no dust can get in.  With nasal plugs you would avoid the risk of breathing in through the nose, but as discussed in the last post.  The draw backs are still the same.

design idea - dust pipe

I've been making a lot of models recently, but the disposable masks I wear to stop breathing in all the dust I create, never seem to properly fit (could be the masks or just the shape of my face).  The problem is designing something that fits properly around everyones nose and mouth.

Whilst pondering this problem, I came up with a dust pipe concept, like a smokers pipe with dust mask parts covering the intake.  Initial experiments prove that it is not ideal.  It works as long as you remember not to breath through your nose and it needs an inbuilt reservoir to collect all the drool you breath down the pipe.  Also shortening it so that it fits much closer to the face away from what your working on will help or an adaption to a divers snorkle? It's a work in progress!

Please consider the idea and not be distracted by my freaky monkey hand.

design idea - plugger

I have a friend who works for the NHS.  She told me that none of the sinks in hospitals have plugs for infection control. Washing in a sink is carried out by leaving the tap running, which wastes huge ammounts of water (throughout all the hospitals in the UK) and makes it very difficult to control temperature if the sink has separate taps.

I started thinking about making a disposable plug from starch based plastics, until I realised that all I really needed was a disk of card - the waxy variety used for coffee cups.  It wouldn't need to be very robust to withstand 15 minutes of one sided immersion, then be pulled out and put in the bin.  It would also be very difficult to be used twice, because once water logged it would start to degrade and it would be very cheap to produce.  I'm sure the problem and solution is not as simple as a disk of card, but something like this could give greater patient experience and cut down on wasting water.