Students Use Microsoft Kinect To Detect When Children/Babies Have Been Left In Cars

We’ve all heard the horror stories where children and babies have died because their parents thought it was a good idea to leave their kids in the car while they run an errand. Of course there could be a number of reasons why parents do that, but in any case it simply is just not a very good idea. However thanks to a handful of students from the John Hopkins University, Anshul Mehra, Yejin Kim, and Jeffrey Kamei, they are looking to prevent such future cases from happening by inventing a gadget that would be able to detect when kids are left in the vehicle.

They realize that by inventing an accessory or gadget that might require it to be worn on the child, or have the parents activate switches and whatnot, it is possible that at some point the parents could forget to do that. So what they did was they actually took a Microsoft Kinect and installed it in a vehicle. Since the Kinect detects motion, the idea behind this project is that when motion has been detected and when a certain level of temperature within the vehicle has been reached, it will then alert someone, such as notify the police, sound an alarm, alert a security service and so on.

This part of the project has since been completed, but the team is hoping that subsequent teams continuing the project will be able to take it and turn it into a commercial product.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Gadgets
Tags: Kinect, Microsoft