On Tue, 13 Sep 2011 14:00:37 -0400, "Robert Green"
wrote:

A good friend of mine bought and installed one of the stairway lifts you see
on TV ads in his dad's house. His dad had serious hip problems that an
artificial hip did not make better. So his dad had basically stopped going
upstairs or downstairs. So his son bought the lift. Things actually went
kind of OK for two years until just recently when the chair stopped midpoint
and his dad got out to descend the stair manually. Well, that didn't work
out so well because he ended up at the bottom of the stairs, pretty badly
banged up from a relatively short fall.

So here's the question. Has anyone ever seen or even thought about
designing a home-brewed "safe" stairway? I've been thinking about a
collection of airbags (or one superlarge one) at the bottom of the stairs,
triggered by some sort of detector circuit that could detect a human falling
down the stairs faster than normal walking. You might still get banged up
pretty badly, but the maximum damage, from what little I could find about
the subject, seems to occur when you hit bottom.

I figure if my cheap little Mayflower GPS system can tell me "You're
speeding" that detecting a mass falling down a stairway is entirely
"doable." (-:

I assume this is going to be costly. However my friend assures me that this
has already been a very costly spill for him (he's taken off work and flown
out to take care of his dad while he recovers - and he feels kind of guilty
for getting the stair lift to begin with).

I know that the leading cause of accidental death in the home environment is
from stairway falls. If a $10K device saves a life (especially mine!) than
I might be willing to pay that.

Say two cats are chasing each other up/down the steps; how would you
prevent the "airbags" from deploying? (thinking out loud)...