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. I immediately put down my thoughts in a sketch (Fig. He designed the sensor to keep his grandfather safe and to provide much needed relief to his aunt, the primary caregiver. 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. 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. Shinozuka recently demonstrated the technology at a local chapter of the Alzheimer's Association and a number of care facilities. “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. 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.
– 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.