Kenneth Shinozuka says that Alzheimer’s Disease is the fastest growing threat to American health, and every sixty seven seconds someone is diagnosed with the disease. The number of patients is expected to triple by the year 2050 and require massive amounts of human and monetary resources to control. Kenneth’s grandfather has Alzheimer’s and the experience has greatly affected not just Kenneth but his entire family due to his grandfather wandering off and getting lost. In his TED Talk My simple invention, designed to keep my grandfather safe Shinozuka discusses his ideas and the development of his Safety Sock.
At the age of six and living in a three generation household Kenneth worried about his grandparents and devised a motion sensor in the bathroom floor to detect a fall. The project won a science fair award but did not move past the idea stage. The idea stuck in Shinozuka’s head and he kept a desire to use sensors to improve the life of the elderly.
Inspiration came when Kenneth saw his grandfather stepped out of bed and his feet hit the floor. A sensor inside the grandfather’s sock could send a signal to a mobile device and alert a caregiver that the patient is up and moving.
The teen split his smart sock project into three phases: designing the sensor, building the circuit and creating a smartphone app. Material testing led Kenneth to print his own film sensors that could measure pressure by monitoring electrical resistance. Bluetooth Low Energy was used to keep the system powered in the middle of the night and was built into the wearable circuit.
If my broadest definition of engineering is that we should all be making the world a better place this is a great contribution to the field. Shinozuka is a great young inventor and has been recognized at the Google Science Fair and won the $50,000 Scientific American Science in Action award in 2014.