Hopefully mainstream skiers won’t need this technology, which isn’t an airbag to float you above an avalanche, but one to save your bacon when you top 70 mph on a sheet of ice in Sochi a year from now during the next winter Olympics. Its designer, Italian brand Dianese, already makes body armor for skiing and mountain biking as well as motocross, and has commercialized a wearable airbag for motorcyclists that deploys automatically in the event of an accident. Well, why not one for downhill skiers, too? The catch, and it’s an important one, is that sensors and gyros need to understand the difference between standard-issue forces that play upon a skier when she or he is on the edge of control vs. fully O.C. or between 60 feet of of air off a pre-jump or when an air goes south. Dianese says their algorithm will prevent such accidental deployments, while still triggering the bag in an actual crash in under 45 milliseconds. Via Gizmodo.

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