Pregnancy can be hard in a myriad of ways. There are those pesky government guidelines that young women not drink if they could ever possibly be pregnant in the future. Then there’s dealing with those who can be extremely insensitive to the fact that as pregnant woman might need a seat on public transport more than them. One South Korean city aims to solve this problem, however, by testing out a system that ensures a pregnant woman a seat on the train.
According to the BBC, 500 women in the city of Busan carried around sensors that would activate pink lights by priority seating when they got on a train. The logic is that this would alert other passengers that they were pregnant, and motivate them to give their seat up to them. These women tested the alert system for five days, which work via bluetooth, like these pregnancy tests.
Mashable has a video demonstrating how this system works, with an able-bodied man giving up his seat when a pregnant woman approaches him, and the sensor by him lights up. On the one hand, this seems pretty embarrassing for everyone involved, but on the other hand, people will go to great lengths not to give up their seats for people in need if they can get away with it. If the sensor system calls attention to them, and allows a pregnant woman to use public transport comfortably, then the self-consciousness seems worth it.
