On Sep 13, 7:00*pm, "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.

--
Bobby G.

The simple answer is to move to a single floor house.