A 10-Year-Old Developed A Remarkably Complex Device To Keep Babies From Dying In Hot Cars

While he’s still got a long way to go, it’s hard not to be impressed with the savvy that 10-year-old Bishop Curry has demonstrated so far. After hearing that a little girl a few towns over had died after being left in a hot car, the McKinney, Texas fifth grader got work on designing The Oasis, a mechanism that will not only cool children trapped in hot cars, but alert their parents to the danger as well.

Bishop’s got a one-year-old sister, so the news of another nearby child’s death hit him pretty hard. He said to a local NBC affiliate, “I knew exactly where the house was. I heard about babies dying in car seats and they could have grown up to be somebody important. It makes me pretty upset.”

Fortunately, Bishop’s father worked for Toyota, so the entrepreneurial kid was able to find an audience with the car manufacturer for possible sponsorship and to get feedback on the feasibility of his invention. The Oasis, currently undergoing prototype design, is an attachment to a child’s car seat that will sense when a child is left in the car. Should the temperature rise above a certain point while a child is thought to be left in the car, the attachment will begin blowing cold air to cool the child and notify the parents and police via text or mobile app of the potentially dangerous situation.

The Curry family recently traveled to Michigan to present their idea at an auto safety conference.

So not only could this device be used by inattentive parents to potentially save their child’s life, but it could also, in some circumstances, make police and child services aware of habitual offenders when it comes to this issue.

The Oasis is being funded initially using crowdsourcing on the GoFundMe platform. Bishop’s raised $4,500 of the targeted $20,000. That money is thought to cover the prototype design and construction, the patent for the product, as well as a plan to mass-produce the device should demand warrant it.