Fifteen-year-old Kenneth Shinozuka of New York City won the $50,000 Scientific American Science in Action Award in August for his invention of a wearable sensor for Alzheimer's patients. The prize, part of the Google Science Fair, recognizes a teen for an innovation that can make a practical difference by addressing an environmental, health or resources challenge. 
 
 Shinozuka's creation—a small pressure sensor that can be attached to a foot or a sock—notifies caregivers via their smartphones if a patient who should be sleeping gets out of bed. His grandfather, who has Alzheimer's disease, served as inspiration. “I don't think I will ever forget my shock at seeing Grandfather in his pajamas, accompanied by a policeman who found him wandering on a nearby freeway in the middle of the night,” Shinozuka says. He designed the sensor to keep his grandfather safe and to provide much needed relief to his aunt, the primary caregiver. Shinozuka recently demonstrated the technology at a local chapter of the Alzheimer's Association and a number of care facilities. He has obtained a U.S. patent for his invention. ||||| Play Facebook 
 
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 IRVINE, Calif. — Reclined in a plush red chair by a sunny window, Ida Mitchell taps her black slippers to the rhythm of the guitar and nods in time with the music. Next to her in the living room, half a dozen residents delicately clap their age-worn hands and sing along to "I've Been Working on the Railroad." Ida will tell you with a smile about her love for bridge and for riding horses. She might tell you more than once. 
 
 Ida, 88, is a resident of Irvine Cottages, an assisted living facility in Irvine, California. Those living here suffer from dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. And while they enjoy the guitar playing and sing-alongs, there is an extra something special in store for them today. 
 
 Kenneth Shinozuka will soon start the eleventh grade. He's a Boy Scout and a lover of the outdoors, and he wants to someday cure Alzheimer's Disease. 
 
 Shinozuka, 15, crosses the cheerily decorated room with its floral paintings and karaoke station, and greets Ida with a handshake and polite salutations. Then, he gets down to business. 
 
 "I made this sock that lets Conrad know when you walk off your chair or out of bed, and lets him know if you need help," Shinozuka says, referring to Ida's nurse. 
 
 "Oh really?" Ida asks. "That's pretty clever." 
 
 "Thank you," he says, in his characteristic politeness. "So we're going to put the sock on you know, if that's okay." Delicately, he kneels down and slides a blue gingham sock equipped with a sensor on Ida's right foot. 
 
 According to the Alzheimer's Association, of the estimated five million Americans with the disease, about 60 percent of them wander — and often become dangerously lost — as a result. 
 
 Shinozuka has invented a pressure sensor that when worn on the bottom of the foot or with a sock detects an increase in pressure and wirelessly sends an alert to a caregiver's smartphone. Not only did Shinozuka come up with the gadget from scratch and teach himself how to make it, but he's also beta testing it on patients like Ida this summer. 
 
 The CEO and founder of Irvine Cottages, gerontologist Jacqueline Dupont recalls the day earlier this summer when the eager 15-year-old called her saying he wanted to help her patients. 
 
 "I just couldn't believe that anyone so young could achieve so much," says Dupont. "I thought he was a college student!" 
 
 Shinozuka gets that a lot. 
 
 He's matter-of-fact as he reviews his device with Dr. Dupont. "Pressure is applied, the alert is sounded," says Shinozuka, squeezing the white, lima-bean sized sensor and triggering a musical chime on the iPhone in his other hand. 
 
 "Oh good. I like the alert. It's much less obnoxious than the other alarms we use. They scare the residents down the hall," says Dupont. In Irvine Cottages and in assisted living facilities across the country, many of the sensors used to detect when seniors have fallen or left an area have burdensome wires that must be clipped to clothing and loud alarms that frighten patients. Shinozuka's device instead directly alerts the caregiver via a wireless signal. 
 
 That idea came from personal experience. 
 
 "My grandfather has lost the capability to eat by himself, to walk by himself, definitely to write and read. He can barely speak anymore. So it's very hard," says Shinozuka. "It's also very hard for my aunt, his primary caregiver, since she's the one who has to take care of him all the time." 
 
 Courtesy Maria Feng 
 
 Shinozuka's grandfather, Deming, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's when Shinozuka was four years old and he regularly wanders out of bed at night. In the first six months Shinozuka attached his device, called the "Safe Wander," to his grandfather's sock, it detected all of Deming's 437 known cases of wandering out of bed with no false alarms. 
 
 His mother, Maria Feng, remembers that breakthrough. "We were so proud, and we also felt the power of the invention. The power of the technology. It was such a great moment." 
 
 Now, Shinozuka hopes to bring that “moment” to more families. "I hope that my device will ultimately reach out to the tens of millions of wandering patients around the world and also relieve the burdens on their caregivers," he said. 
 
 His innovation has already won him a $50,000 prize and "Science in Action" award from Scientific American Magazine. 
 
 He will also compete in the Google Science Fair in September in California. But he's looking farther into the future than that: he hopes to be a neuroscientist and specialize in engineering and computer science. 
 
 "I'd like to solve some of the mysteries of the brain, and invent tools to ultimately, I think, cure Alzheimer's and other mental conditions that our aging population suffers from," says Shinozuka. ||||| Existing technologies did not provide a solution to my problem. For instance, widely used GPS tracking devices do not work indoors. More recent real-time locating systems based on radio-frequency (RF) ID tags are neither accurate nor quick enough to detect patients’ leaving bed. Initially, I considered attaching pressure sensors to the legs of a bed, but the system would be expensive and could trigger a false alarm from my grandmother, who was sleeping on the same bed as my grandfather. 
 
 One night, I was looking after my grandfather and saw him step out of bed. The moment his foot landed on the floor, a light bulb flashed in my head. Why don’t I put a pressure sensor on the heel of his foot? The moment he steps onto the floor, the sensor would detect the pressure caused by his body weight, and the signal could wirelessly trigger an audible alert in my aunt’s Smartphone. This would enable my aunt to sleep much better at night without worrying about Grandfather. 
 
 I immediately put down my thoughts in a sketch (Fig. 1) and started research. First, I had to find a pressure sensor that was thin and flexible enough not to affect the comfort of walking. An extensive literature search led me to a film sensor printed with pressure-sensitive ink. When pressure is applied, the ink becomes more electrically conductive. The pressure can thus be calculated by measuring the conductivity. I also thought about creating a sensor out of conductive rubber, but found it difficult to make such a sensor thin enough after testing material samples. 
 
 My second challenge was designing a wearable circuit to acquire signal from the pressure sensor and wirelessly trigger an alert in a remote Smartphone when the pressure exceeds a certain threshold. The circuit needed to be compact, lightweight and human-friendly. However, the energy-consuming wireless transmission requires large, heavy batteries. A search of state-of-the-art wireless systems led me to Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), a rapidly-evolving, revolutionary wireless technology that has recently enabled the creation of many novel wearable systems. Implementing BLE required a significant amount of expertise, which I had to acquire through extensive studying and testing of BLE modules. After months of research, I was able to design a circuit that would integrate such a module with my film sensor and be powered by a coin battery. 
 
 In addition, I needed to design apps to transform a Smartphone into a caretaker’s monitor. I took online courses and tutorials to learn coding for the most widely-used Android and iOS phones. With the help of a mentor, I deepened my knowledge about the core Bluetooth framework, which enabled me to establish communications between the BLE circuit and Smartphone while minimizing energy consumption. 
 
 This research convinced me of the feasibility of my proposed wearable sensor system, thanks to the recent advances in Smartphones and BLE wireless technologies. I made a one-year project plan with five major tasks to realize my proposed sensor system (Table 1).
– When Kenneth Shinozuka's grandfather, who has Alzheimer's, was found wandering on a freeway at night, it left a deep impression on the 15-year-old; now he has been recognized for an invention to make sure it never happens again. The device is a pressure sensor that can be worn as a sock or attached to the foot of a patient. If that patient gets out of bed, his or her caretaker is alerted via smartphone, Scientific American reports. Shinozuka has won the magazine's $50,000 Science in Action Award for the device via Google's Science Fair. "My grandfather is one of the 5.2 million Alzheimer’s patients in the U.S., 65% of whom wander," the teen writes at the Science Fair's site. His research shows the invention works: "A six-month trial on my grandfather validated my hypothesis: the systems detected 100% of the 437 known cases of his wandering and issued alerts within one second of his stepping out of bed." As for future plans, he's been testing the device on other patients, and he tells NBC News that he hopes it "will ultimately reach out to the tens of millions of wandering patients around the world and also relieve the burdens on their caregivers." The news comes after another teen developed a potentially life-saving system of her own—this one for kids in hot cars.