Walmart wants to know what makes your heart beat faster. Literally: the American supermarket giant has requested a patent for shopping carts that register everything from customers’ heartbeats to their conversations.
How soft and how large are your hands?
Walmart has requested a patent for smart, biometric handles on shopping carts, that would allow the retailer to gain unprecedented information on the person pushing the cart along in the store – according to Geek.com. The handles should be better at reading palms than the best clairvoyants out there: they register your heartbeat and your body temperature, but also how large your hands are, how soft, how moist and even the degree to which they absorb oxygen.
The cart can also register information on the movements and the environment of the cart itself: it measures the cart’s speed and learns its location through a wireless network connection. Even the temperature in the store is recorded. Thanks to built-in microphones, the cart also registers the audio in the environment. Walmart claims that this feature is useful to find out how noisy the store is, but potentially the shopping cart might be eavesdropping on everyone’s supermarket bickering soon.
First aid in case of sweaty hands and heart palpitations
Walmart names several possible applications for the smart cart: the company wants to learn how many people visit certain aisles and how long they stay there, using location and movement tracking. Walmart also hopes to provide better service: is someone experiencing sweaty palms and palpitations? Time to bring an employee to help out. The cart might even alert the store when someone falls down.
The arrival of the sensory shopping cart is still far from certain. Innovative companies experimenting with new technology, like Walmart and Amazon are doing in retail, request patents very often, only to ensure that no one else steals their wild ideas. One of Amazon’s most famous patent inventions was a parcel-delivering zeppelin.
