HOUSTON, May 21 (UPI) -- Five new graduates of Rice University spent the last year designing an add-on accessory for car seats that can alert parents they have left their infant in a sweltering car by themselves, as well as keep the child's temperature cool until help arrives.
Infant SOS, designed at Rice's Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen, can sense when a vehicle is moving and whether there is a child in the seat, alerting parents via light, sound and text message that their infant is potentially in danger. As the temperature rises in the car, a heat-triggered material also helps to keep the infant's temperature down.
"The benefit of our project is not only the alert system, but also the cooling system," said Rachel Wang, one of the graduates who designed Infant SOS, in a press release. "The best way to keep a child alive is to completely remove them from the car seat inside a hot car."
When the car stops moving, a row of LED lights around the top of the car seat flashes and an alarm begins to sound. If, after five minutes, the infant is still in the seat, the system sends text messages to a preset list of phone numbers, which can include emergency services.
The project was started in 2013 by a different group of students, with this year's team focused on the cooling system and improvements to the alert system. The goal of the project is to make the system easy to use and affordable, with a target price of $150.
