Latham’s CIA Hit & Run and the Simple Device that Saved His Life
In a world where the bicycle is a more predominant mode of transportation, Kroma Labs leverages our human centered design approach for building compelling technology experiences, to provide Smart Halo with a fall detection algorithm and medical alert service. Kroma Labs once again crafts a consumer connected product to work so well that it’s to hard to imagine a world with out this new magic in it.
A Not so Ancient Future:
Its September 15, 2027 and Latham had been sitting in class since since 8am that day. Wednesday’s were his long haul of a class day. He had back to back class from 8am to 6pm. Luckily it was still summer and the days were long. He still had a few hours to make it out to beach and see the sunset. So the moment that second hand touched 6, he stood up with his bag packed and he rushed to the door.
In no time he had made his way to disengage his bike from the community cage of CCA where he was attending design school, learning from the greats of his field. He flew off the side walk and into the street. He was no more then 20 meters into his journey when an SUV swerved at his bicycle. His front wheel crumbled on impact, knees buckled and popped like fresh grapes in Tuscan barrels at harvest. In a blur of force his cheek broke against the wind shield and like an old tattered rag doll his young and once strong body was ravaged like never before.
Latham lay on the ground in excruciating pain, motionless, completely conscious, and desperate for help. However, in this section of town and most areas since 2022 and the Lok-i-mon-chō massacre. People rioted when they discovered that rogue CIA operatives were systematically killing thousands of citizens to steel block chain encrypted currency being laundered by AR game characters in Pokemon Go. The operatives had access to the CCTV network and everyones phone who played Pokemon go, so they had a God’s eye view of the word. In neighbor hoods all over the United States everyone, even suburban soccer mom’s were turning over cars and tearing down telephone poles to get at the CCTV that had been input nearly everywhere at that point. People destroyed their phones that had the game on them and installs dropped to historic new numbers.
In Case You Don’t Already Know
In the chance that you still have no idea what I am talking about, I will give you the full story, but feel free to skip ahead if this is an old hat. Six years ago in 2021 Pokemon Go had a big resurgence as AR technology started to get way more mobile and efficient. People were playing all of the time and it started to mesh into more serious cult network of players. People were playing all of the time and it started to mesh into more serious cult networks. It transmutated at that point into a type of blood sport — where people would do almost anything to get certain Poki. The reason being is that those unique Poki weren’t really just Poki, they were stacked piles of cash that the Russian mafia was using to get their bit coin into the U.S.
They had implemented huge recursion scripts into block chain stores of bit coin then deployed them into cute squishy harmless looking characters where exchanges were happening in Augmented spaces. It was their new method of laundering money into the U.S.
A shadow group of Pokemon Go players emerged called Lok-i-mon-chō, or commonly known as Loki. Loki players were hackers (who were actually X CIA information officers) and they decided to get rich and profit from their knowledge. Loki were arranging exchanges for mirror trades to acquire these special Poki and at the exchange the Loki would kill the person there to trade, take their money, and cash out the special Poki.
Back To Our Poki Hunter and Why This Happened
Latham, our protagonist from earlier was a Poki hunter himself and he was quite a good one. He was also a hacker and with equal prowess to his Poki hunting skills, so good in fact that he had taken quite a bit of money out of Loki pockets. They started stalking him in every aspect of his life, because of this loss they were taking week after week and today was the day they had been plotting for weeks. It was time to take Latham down.
A Life Nearly Lost
Jean a Loki operative and x marine special forces, had been camped out in front of CCA for a week watching Latham come and go and he knew at this point where he had an open spot. He precision timed it to the half second when Latham would be in his cross hairs and in that second Jean’s truck was a at peak speed. Latham never had a chance of turning his bike to get away.
Those moments when Latham lay on the ground and all definitely seemed lost. He knew there were no cameras around it was unlikely anyone would see him for a while. He desperately questioned if today was the day he would die. In that exact moment he doubted tomorrow, he felt a buzz in his pocket under his crushed and broken leg. He then felt his bike subtly vibrate and saw a bright blue light pulsing on the ground.
The Simple Device That Saved The Day
He laughed a little then, his rib broken in 4 places sent a sharp pain through to his spine and it hurt to breathe. However, Latham knew though then that his friend at Kroma Labs had just helped him install a Smart Halo on his bike.
Smart Halo was a sophisticated partner device to his mobile phone. It spoke through the network to gather way finding data of where he was and where he was going. Innate in the phone was a 21 axis accelerometer and a 9 axis was in the Smart Halo device. Essentially when Latham fell, a fall detection algorithm sensed that fall, pushed that data to the phone for a secondary authentication, and the countdown began.
The reason Latham laughed is he knew in 30 seconds, unless he dismissed it an ambulance would be deployed to his location. The device was connected to an EMS medical alert service that monitored his bike for falls 24 hours a day. The second that the countdown ended Latham’s care network: his girl friend, Mom, Dad, and sister were all notified he had fallen and where he was. In a addition to that an ambulance would be at that same location with in 90 seconds.
The ambulance arrived swiftly that day, Latham had about 20 broken bones and some severe internal bleeding, but because of Smart Halo he got the medical attention he needed and just when he needed it. Luckily that happened as he still rides out to the beach at sunsets.
Epilogue:
When I kicked this project off in 2017 by redesigning my commute, I was simply doing a personal inventory of where things were and thinking about how I might be able to make them better. I performed a mental inventory of sorts of recalling every trip I made into school and then recapping on what was lacking in each of those. It wasn’t too remarkable in the way I went about it. It was really just basic interaction design method. Looking at touch points and considering them. I came up with a handful of ideas at that time and this happened to be one of them. The tech to make all this work had been around then for a bit of time and it was an obvious need then. However, I didn’t think the market would support it the way I needed and I didn’t have the capital to do it then. As the laws shifted over the last ten years and society moved towards the bicycle in such a way I knew it was time to make this happen.
My mental existence is paradoxical. What I mean by that is that while I am a creative person and I have always represented that way for good or bad; bad because in high school in Texas (where I grew up), ‘being different’ was frowned upon. I am the son of a electrical engineer and the way I think is extremely linear. I am a systems thinker. I can see 100 steps ahead of this future moment to this future thing and I can reverse engineer it in my mind; what I see should exist, to make it exist. I have always done this and it started at the age of 4.
- In this project, I was really forced to think about where the world is going and make strong arguments for why. I generally establish knowledge off of what I know exists and when I see the patterns of things that could be joined the just start to merge in my head.
While seeing that way is good and useful to making things it is also useful at selling them. A lot of selling is about knowing what people want to buy. When you look into things and do serious research you can see all the patterns of things. Your opinion of the world is enriched in such way you can make really informed decisions and they are powerful, because you have become a domain expert of sorts in that space.
- I don’t really want to personally be in the ‘bike way-finding’ business but I am incredibly interested in designing and building technology products that help people in meaningful ways. I saw all of this potential in and this feature I drafted notes about 10 years ago was still relevant today (well not today) about 3 years ago. Things take a while to make so this didn’t just happen over night. However in 2024 I noticed nobody had ever taken the time to build this. So I brought this project to Smart Halo who our studio thought were the best people in the GPS way-finding space for bikes. We started playing with some accelerometers in the studio and we just presented the raw research.
- They got back to us right away and were interested in developing it. I wouldn’t have thought that would have been possible to cold reach out to a potential client with a baked idea, but it worked. They had us develop the product out.
In 2017 when I started working on this originally, the future I imagined is funny to go back and read. Some things we imagine were really silly, but the technique of really trying to put yourself 10 years in the future or any point in the future is incredibly impactful. So its easy to overlook being off. Its cool to play Nostradamus, good ideas happen when you get fictitious and explore. It’s a good way to transport the mind out of ‘what is’ and into ‘what could be.’
I Hope To Inspire Other Student’s Like Myself In the Future
I hope 10 years from today I could be reading stories similar to this one that write now, that I inspired in a student who is hoping to change the world. I would challenge anyone who wants to make a thing, to imagine a future world first, where you want that thing to sell because making things sure does take a long time and the world is full. You have to be ready to compete and knowing what you are competing against is half the battle.
