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How Young Inventors Are Helping Their Communities Fight COVID-19

All around the world, young people are inventing devices that prevent the spread of COVID-19 where they live.

In the U.S. state of Virginia, high school students Andrew Tran and Rayan Yu developed an app that assists students with their remote school work. Dubbed “AmeliaX, the system uses artificial intelligence to help kids learn and answer questions, so their parents don’t have to assist them.

Across the Atlantic, Ezedine Kamil, an 18-year-old science student who lives in rural Ethiopia, whipped up a number of smart inventions to protect his community from COVID-19. He created a sensor-equipped touchless electrical soap dispenser, a sensor-based wrist device that warns people when they are about to touch their face, and an affordable mechanical ventilator with a plastic punch, and a screen that can be controlled through a smartphone.

“When I heard about the global shortage and the high price of ventilators [$30,000, €27,613 each], I thought about building them myself,” Kamil told DW Akademie. “Ethiopia used to import those machines, but I didn’t think foreign countries would help us at this time.”

In India, students invented a bunch of cool designs that can help reduce the spread of COVID-19. They include a touchless, ultrasonic sensor-embedded doorbell, a sensor-based sanitation wrist band that automatically projects UV light or sprays sanitizer on objects to kill the virus, and infrared sensor-equipped sunglasses that beep when someone wearing them is standing too close to others. Brothers Kartik and Vinayak Tara invented the sunglasses. The brothers, who are in class 8 and class 4, also created a portable wooden ventilator interfaced with a mobile app. 

“We have created a wooden structure in which the ball is fixed between two walls,” Kartik Tara told NDTV. “When pushed, the ball gets pumped. The whole structure is fixed with a motor that moves automatically with the time set which is required to pump that ball and this whole circuit is programmed in a way that it works automatically.”

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