Smartphone case acts as ‘airbag,’ pops open to prevent falling phones from cracking

Its to be our daily trauma to get emotional when our phone drops to the ground and pray not to see the phone with a broken screen. This could be panic to every consumer who holds a smartphone. Now you may get relax from all this drama as you might protect your resplendent smartphone from being damaged by affording ‘mobile airbag’, which will prevent your phone from getting damaged when dropped.

Philip Frenzel, a 25-year-old master’s student at Aalen University in Germany, knew the feeling all too well. So, he decided to create a product to help prevent any damage from occurring. He calls it the “mobile airbag,” formally known as the “active damping” case.

This product is not exactly the same as it is named but comes with metal springs that deploy when the sensors on the case detect that the phone is in free fall. When the sensors activate, they trigger four springs — located on each corner of the case — to unfold and poke out in two directions, preventing the phone from hitting the ground. This way, no matter how the phone falls, the springs absorb the shock of the fall allowing the phone to remain effectively ‘airborne’.

When you pick the device up, you can fold the “set of eight thin metal curls” back inside the case.

Frenzel’s invention is still a hit, though. It won a top award from the German Society for Mechatronics in 2018. The 25-year-old engineering student plans to post the product on crowdfunding site Kickstarter in July, hoping it takes off.

The idea of a mobile airbag isn’t new, with Amazon having secured a patent for a design back in 2012. However, that particular design actually involved air being expelled from the product. Considering that six years later we haven’t seen any evidence of a final product along those lines, it’s safe to say that development has been shelved.