Preventable Tragedy: Teen’s Invention Aims To Stop Hot Car Deaths

ACROSS AMERICA — Since 1998, nearly 900 U.S. children have died in hot cars. In many cases, their parents simply forgot they were in the back seat — something a Kansas City, Missouri, teen hopes to change with The Baby Saver, an invention that monitors children in back-seat car carriers.

Kelly Ann Greene, 17, won a national invention award with her device, which she hopes to pitch to investors on “Shark Tank,” according to news reports.

Greene took second-place honors for her device at Invention Convention, held this year in Kansas City. The global K-12 invention program teaches students to identify problems and solve them, entrepreneurship and creative skills, and helps builds confidence in students.

Greene, who just graduated from St. Teresa’s Academy and plans to study engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz, began working on her Baby Saver invention as a freshman, long before she knew about the contest.

She told The Pitch she was inspired by news stories about children who die in hot cars.

“I really like just being able to potentially help someone,” Greene told The Pitch. “Just having that idea and that motivation makes it really rewarding (to know) that possibly one day this invention could save a baby’s life.”

Hot car deaths are a national tragedy — and a preventable one. On average, 38 children a year die of vehicular heatstroke. The number of kids who died in hot cars dropped to 25 during the pandemic last year. So far this year, there have been seven pediatric heatstroke deaths, according to noheatstroke.org.

But how does it happen?

In many cases, children dying in hot cars have loving, caring and attentive parents, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

• Read More: How Loving Parents Forget Their Kids In Hot Cars

“Heatstroke isn't about irresponsible people intentionally leaving children in cars,” the agency said. “Most cases occur when a child is mistakenly left or gets into a vehicle unattended and becomes trapped.”

In many cases, a parent completely loses awareness that the child is in the car, according to David Diamond, professor of psychology, molecular pharmacology and physiology at the University of South Florida who has studied the hot car deaths phenomenon for 15 years.

His research shows parents can forget their kids are in the car as a result of competition among the brain's memory systems — the "habit memory" system that allows people to rotely perform routine tasks without thinking about them, and the "prospective memory" system used to plan. The habit memory system typically prevails, and the problem is particularly acute among parents experiencing sleep deprivation or stress, according to Diamond.

"Often these stories involve a distracted parent," Gene Brewer, an Arizona State University associate professor of psychology, said in a press release. "Memory failures are remarkably powerful, and they happen to everyone. There is no difference between gender, class, personality, race or other traits. Functionally, there isn't much of a difference between forgetting your keys and forgetting your child in the car."

However, in some cases, "I forgot" is just a ruse. In 2016, Justin Ross Harris of Marietta, Georgia, was convicted of murder in the death his 22-month-old son, Cooper, who was left in a hot car for seven hours in 2014 while Harris went to work. According to testimony at his trial, Harris' web searches revealed that he longed for a "child-free lifestyle."

Regardless of how it happens, it shouldn’t, Greene told news station KMBC, calling hot car deaths “an avoidable problem.”

“I mean, everybody forgets,” she said.

Her programmable device can detect if children are in their car seats; and monitors their temperature, pulse and other vital signs and senses if they are spiking into dangerous levels. It connects through an app that sends an alert with a GPS signal to both the parents and emergency services, Greene told The Pitch.

Greene is refining her device, for which she has received a provisional patent, to make it smaller before she makes a play for a “Shark Tank” appearance.

“It’s pretty clunky right now. It’s about the size of maybe a big mug,” Greene told The Pitch. “It’s pretty large right now just because the parts I used for it are the basic building parts from Amazon, such as a Raspberry Pi unit with extensions.”

She told KMBC her hope is “to get this developed into something that could be used in a real car and could save a child's life.”

Next up for Greene is the Invention Convention world competition.