A Fifth Grader Has Invented A Device To Prevent Hot Car Deaths
A Black fifth grader has created a device to prevent hot car deaths from happening.
Bishop Curry V has invented a device called "Oasis," which is currently in its design phase. The device would work as follows: the contraption would attach to a car seat and detect if a child is left inside the car. Upon detecting the child the device would blow cool air until parents and authorities are notified.
In a report from The Anna-Melissa Tribune, Curry's initial idea for his Oasis device was to create a car seat cover with three fans. Now however, he hopes to build a car seat that can connect to a car's air conditioning system and turn it on automatically.
Curry was inspired to create Oasis following the death of a baby that died in a minivan last summer in McKinney, TX (Curry and his family also reside in McKinney).
"Sometimes babies fall asleep and they're really quiet, so if you're rushing home from work or you're rushing to the grocery store, I could see how somebody could forget," said Bishop Curry IV in an interview with NBC. Bishop is an engineer for Toyota in Plano and Curry's father.
Bishop told Toyota about his son's idea, and the company sent the two out to the Toyota Technical Center in Detroit, where they both got the chance to witness safety tests on vehicles. Curry also got the opportunity to talk with the director of engineering and program management for Evenflo, a company that creates car seats and child devices.
Bishop has an intellectual patent on Oasis, with the father and son currently raising funds for the project.
"The cool thing about Bishop's thinking is none of this technology is new," Bishop said to the Tribune. "We have things to alert our phone, we have ways to provide either cooling through a fan or through an air condition system. We have ways to detect weight. So none of it is new, so we feel like the way he's thinking and combining all these technologies will get to production faster than if it's something that is just a brand new type of technology."
Such a device is necessary: 39 children died of heat stroke in hot car incidents last year, seven in Texas, according to a San Jose State University meteorologist who tracks the data.
