T3 4:28 (buckling) that’s Emily strapping on our large bulky seatbelt prototype…
Vicky Thomas and her team of fellow inventors from Saint Paul’s School in Concord, gathered around a mattress in an auditorium at MIT, dressed in matching bright blue t-shirts.
Their team was one of 18 from high schools around the country.
They came to present inventions they built with grants from the MIT’s Lemelson Program – an initiative for young scientists, to develop inventions that serve the public good.
Theirs is a wireless sensor to detect when elderly residents of nursing homes and assisted living communities fall down.
It’s about the size of one of those single-serving cereal boxes, and it’s attached to a seatbelt strap.
T4 0:00 Emily is wearing the 2 accelerometers that detect up/down acceleration and left/right acceleration. So as Emily will fall – Emily fall away – she falls and the graph over there skyrockets with her acceleration.
If this were a nursing home, the data on the graph would be transmitted to an attendant’s station, alerting someone to go help the fallen patient.
T5 1:46 we were told the invention was supposed to assist in the community…
Dan Desa (DISS-uh), a senior at St. Paul’s says part of the inspiration for the device came from one of the group’s faculty advisors.
T6 0:31 he told us a story about how his father once fell, and he was too was proud, or just felt he could do it himself to call for help, and he didn’t and he was there for a day and a half, overnight, I believe outside, so that’s even worse.
The team is working with a local assisted living facility, and plans to test its devices out on some willing senior residents.
[2 sec. ambi pause, then bring up T7 2:53 (bolts noise) wait does the screw go on this way? [MIX UNDER] Ya, like that, the wingnut. Push that in more? (snap) there we go… (twisting) you gotta hold it in… you want me to do it? I got it. Cool.
Across the auditorium, a team from Littleton High School is setting up another invention designed to address a community problem – the cost of maintaining the roads during the winter.
T8 1:21 (bolts, tightening)… this is the Argus 5 unit…
18 year old Tom Sundman is the group’s captain.
T9 1:36 it’s a simple remote weather sensor, tells temperature humidity and pressure and gives you an image.
Sundman says the Argus is basically a computer, a bunch of sensors, and a tiny camera, all inside a weatherproof box.
The sensors measure weather conditions like temperature, barometric pressure and humidity.
The camera takes a picture per minute of whatever it’s aimed at, and then computer transmits all that information to a website.
Sundman and his team call it the Argus after a creature from Greek Mythology that had 100 eyes .
t10 3:05ish so the whole idea is that we have a network of these, so it’s like you have 100 eyes looking at these different locations.
Littleton High senior Matt Mukerjee says his group started out building a remote weather sensor system to detect Littleton’s first snowfall.
Then the town called, asking if the system could be used to monitor road conditions without having to send out the snowplows, and drivers on overtime pay.
T12 5:16 they get a lot of calls saying, ‘oh there’s snow here, we need this plowed’ and they go out there and it’s already melted. So by having an Argus on a telephone pole near that area, they’ll know exactly where to plow and when and that’ll save them a lot of money.
Mukerjee and Sundman say their team’s invention has a lot of potential beyond Littleton.
T12 tom - 1:48 other people are coming to us to say maybe we could use this for flooding, if you could just see the location, high flood banks, set them up there, maybe track flooding, also forest fires in CO, if you put them in those dry spots, you can detect them in the middle of nowhere…
T13 6:14 matt - the sky’s the limit for this, there’s so many things we can do, whenever anyone comes up to us and says, “I’ve heard of your project, can you do this?’ we can basically just tell them yes!
The team got its grant as this year’s Lemelson-MIT alumni school.
In 2002, another team from Littleton won a grant to develop sidewalk heaters that melt ice using recycled heat from the school’s boilers.
T14 5:43 the students are now known in the community as technical experts.
That’s Bill Church, the Littleton team’s faculty advisor, and Physics teacher.
He says the town’s perception of its high school as a think tank does wonders for the students.
T14 7:30 they can help somebody right now with their ideas, that it’s not to do an assignment that goes into a teacher’s box… but that their assignments, their thinking can help a community.
That kind of interaction wasn’t the original aim of the MIT grant program.
But Lemelson Grant Officer Josh Schuler says it’s a welcome result.
1:06 We view InvenTeams as a way to spark a culture of invention, and Bill Church and the Littleton group took that spark, and ran with it, and it’s really cultivated an amazing culture there. And you got the whole town behind them… that’s terrific to see.
This summer, 2 Littleton residents are paying Team Argus to keep working on their devices, so they can save money for college.
It's a long way from 100 eyes, but the team hopes to have 2 or 3 new sensors ready to watch over the roads by next winter.
For NHPR News, I’m SM.
