Centralized Obituary Service with Geospatial Filtering
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current methods for distributing death notices, such as newspaper obituaries, are costly, outdated, and limited in reach, failing to notify all connected individuals globally, and often rely on external sources that can lead to premature or false postings.
Innovation Solution
A centralized system that receives obituaries directly from funeral homes, allowing families to post notices in multiple locations for a flat fee, with features for geospatial location-based display, notification, and donation, ensuring authenticity and reducing costs, while also enabling birth notice posting through hospitals.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If obituaries are published in newspapers, then the death notice reaches local readers, but the cost is very high and the reach is limited to a specific area
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces funeral home directors as intermediaries who verify and post obituaries on behalf of families. This mediator system ensures authenticity by requiring professional verification while simplifying the process for grieving families who would otherwise need to navigate complex publishing systems themselves.
Solution Approach 2:
The system enables funeral home directors to self-post obituaries through an automated online platform, eliminating the need for manual newspaper submission processes. This self-service mechanism reduces costs and increases speed while maintaining reliability through the professional oversight of funeral home directors.
2Area of stationary object
If obituaries are posted in multiple newspaper areas, then the notice reaches more people, but the cost increases significantly
Solution Approach 1:
The online obituary platform serves multiple geographic regions simultaneously through a single posting. A single obituary posted on the centralized website becomes universally accessible to users across different locations, eliminating the need for separate purchases in multiple newspaper markets while achieving broader geographic reach.
Solution Approach 2:
The system transitions from physical newspaper distribution (two-dimensional local circulation) to digital online distribution (multi-dimensional global accessibility). This dimensional shift allows one obituary to reach users across multiple geographic areas simultaneously without proportional cost increases.
3Productivity
If families pay newspaper publishing fees, then the obituary is published, but the money goes to the newspaper company not to funeral services
Solution Approach 1:
The system extracts the obituary publishing function from traditional newspaper companies and relocates it to a specialized online platform partnered with funeral home directors. This extraction allows families to retain control over content and pricing while achieving rapid publication, separating the publishing function from profit-driven newspaper models.
4Ease of operation
If obituaries are obtained from external sources, then the service is easier to implement, but premature or false obituaries may be posted
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary verification by requiring funeral home directors to confirm deaths before posting obituaries. This preliminary action by trusted professionals prevents premature or false obituaries from being posted, ensuring reliability while maintaining ease of operation through the established trust relationship with funeral home directors.
Data Source
AI summary
A centralized obituary service that effectively and efficiently distributes death notices, obituaries, to the general public. The service utilizes a user location for a user account in order to display obituaries from a plurality of obituaries to the user account. More specifically, the user location is compared to biographical information of each of the obituaries in order to identify location-related obituaries. Said location-related obituaries are then displayed with a user personal computing (PC) device. Next, the service prompts the user account to enter a search query request through the user PC device, wherein the search query request includes a set of biographical criteria. A set of biographically matching obituaries are then identified by a remote server. The biographical information for each within the set of biographically matching obituaries meets at least one of the biographical criteria. Finally, the set of biographically-matching obituaries is displayed by the user PC device.