Hydrothermal Hat/Headband: Lemelson-MIT Grant 2019-2020
Photo courtesy of Omina Nematova
Hey Knights! This week, ACP’s INVENTEAM submitted their final application to the Lemelson-MIT Grant that grants them the possibility to earn $10,000 for coming up with an innovative solution to real-world problems. This year’s project was creating a Hydrothermal Hat/Headband to prevent heat exhaustion. The top 30 teams, ACP being one of them, will submit their application by September; 15 out of 30 teams will be selected to win $10,000. If they get admitted, they will have the opportunity to develop the prototype and attend the Eurekafest 2020 at MIT. The members who participated were Omina Nematova, Abraham Troop, Sohani Sandhu, Kaitlyn Lai, Alex Kroumov, Daniel Wu, Nealin Banerjee, Jacob Kaufman-Warner, Diya Nath, Pooja Athmanathan, and were advised by Rachna Nath. I asked the students to give us an overview of what the project was about:
Q: Can you explain what the project is about?
A: The grant that we applied for is the Lemelson-MIT Grant which grants $10,000 to any high school team to come up with any innovative solution that will help our community grow. The purpose of our project was to prevent heat stress; we created a hat that has sensors embedded in it, which can detect fast changes in temperature and your pulse to see if you are at risk for heat exhaustion. If you are at risk, it will send a message to your phone telling you to get inside or to drink water.
Q: How will this project be helpful to society?
A: We wanted to find a solution to a real-world problem in Arizona. Since the heat is the main problem and many people in Arizona suffer from heatstroke or exhaustion, we wanted to prevent that from happening.
Q: How was the INVENTEAM formed?
A: The four sophomores in the group were in Mrs. Nath’s Honors Biology 5th period class last year; she picked us because we were willing to work for it and showed interest. The six freshmen were chosen based on tests we administered and interviews that we did.
We are so proud of the accomplishment the INVENTEAM has put out and we hope all goes well! Here is a quote written by Omina, sharing her thoughts on how proud she is of the team:
“Everyone in the group has worked very hard and spent many nights on our application for the Lemelson-MIT Grant. We turned it in the morning of September 3 and can’t wait to hear back if we got the $10,000.” – Omina Nematova
