Hussein Hirani
Grade 9
Trabuco Canyon, CA
Inducted: 2022
Drowning is very prevalent across the United States, with around 3,960 deaths occurring each year in the country. One-fifth of accidental drownings were of children aged 14 and under. Most young children of ages 1-4 that drown end up drowning in pools. A challenge in preventing these unnecessary deaths is the fact that drowning is very hard to monitor and detect. This is as in most cases of drowning, the drowning occurs silently, and is often unnoticeable. The solutions available to prevent drowning are either too expensive, fail to work properly, or both. Therefore, I created a wearable device designed to be worn by the swimmer. The device connects to an app which I designed via Bluetooth. When the swimmer enters water, the device senses the water using a water sensor, and transmits that information via Bluetooth to the app. Based on this information, the app displays whether the swimmer is in water or not. Once the device has detected water and sent this information the the app, the app will then start a timer. When the timer reaches 30 seconds, the app issues a Drowning Warning. At 60 seconds, the app issues a Drowning Alert. The materials used for the device were an Arduino Nano microcontroller, a water sensor, and HC-05 Bluetooth Module, a breadboard, and jumper wires to connect the parts.