10 Inventions on collapsible keyboards: A TRIZ based analysis
This work is incremental, focusing on categorizing existing mechanisms for keyboard size reduction in portable computing devices.
The paper analyzes 10 different collapsible keyboard inventions from the US patent database to address the problem of fitting keyboards into portable computers, using TRIZ methodology for analysis.
Although a bigger keyboard is often comfortable to work with, they cannot be fit into laptop and small size computer boxes. The portable and handheld computers need small size keyboards. So there is a need to reduce the size of the keyboard to fit into the laptop box. There are various mechanisms to reduce the size of the keyboard; collapsible keyboard is one of them. Although different inventions intend to achieve the same objective of reducing the keyboard size, they all differ in their mechanism. For example, some invention uses a compression mechanism, some invention uses a folding mechanism, and some invention uses a collapsing mechanism and so on. This article illustrates 10 inventions on collapsible keyboards from US patent database. Each case is analyzed from a TRIZ perspective.