Originally Posted by Waco Kid
I think you need the tether and the accelerometer. If you T-bone a car, your body is going to take a hard hit before the tether gets pulled. If you just lay the bike down, the accelerometer probably won't trigger. The tether makes me think my electric vest, and how I always forget to unplug it. Maybe it could be like a keyless remote and sense that your body is more than x-number of mm from the gas tank while the bike is moving.
Yeah, part of that logic package. RFID or Bluetooth (for example) so you know if you're near the bike, and perhaps if it's moving, you're moving but you don't agree on direction.
A lowside ought to manifest as the bike going downward whilst the rider and bike are at a severe lean angle. You'd need to sort out the difference between that and coming over a dip into a turn, but it all seems doable with enough time to figure it out.
Having an electronics package would also be nice for logging what actually happened in crashes. A bit ghoulish perhaps, but it would be good to have real data about what forces are visited on body and bike all the way through a crash.
Anyway, we're probably getting a bit geekish here. I still reckon the current airbag jackets likely offer a real safety benefit, and I'd still like to see a bunch of testing. I think that a full electronics package could offer benefits beyond a mechanical tether, but that the tether is still very useful.