Kansas City teen’s invention aims to prevent children dying in hot cars

By Alan Shope

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    KANSAS CITY, Missouri (KMBC) — What started out as a high school class project for one student has turned into something much bigger and it won a national invention award.

“My invention had the most market potential,” said Kelly Ann Greene, 17.

Greene invented and patented The Baby Saver, a black box that monitors how a baby is doing in the back seat of a car and to help make sure no one ever forgets the child is sitting there.

“If it detects that the baby is going into heatstroke, it sends an alert to the parents,” Greene said.

She said she came up with the idea after hearing about a baby dying in a hot car.

“(It’s) such an avoidable problem,” Greene said.

So she got to work.

“You’re able to program the device,” she said.

It has GPS, instant texting and it will even alert police if there’s an issue with the exact location of the baby.

“I mean, everybody forgets,” Greene said.

With nearly 30 infant deaths a year nationally related to hot cars and more than 2,000 with sudden infant death syndrome, Greene said she hopes her invention will save lives.

“I’m so grateful I was given this opportunity to develop it,” she said.

Greene said that the next step is to make it smaller and to try to find a way to get on “Shark Tank” to promote the idea.

“I hope to get this developed into something that could be used in a real car and could save a child’s life,” she said.

Her idea now heads to the world competition.

Greene is heading to college at the University of California, Santa Cruz to play volleyball and study engineering. She said she will be taking some business classes, too, just in case her idea takes off.

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