On Saturday Apr. 20. a team of five DHS students won the annually A. H. Nickless Innovation Competition at SVSU. To compete, the team needed to work out an abstract for a new innovation project and present it to SVSU for review. For the team of the five DHS students, juniors Aditya Middha, Brandon Zhu, Mitchell Hayes, and Dachuan Yan and senior Megan Heydrick, this is their second year to compete for the award. In 2016, they designed a smoke detector for forest fires which would inform firefighters and park rangers after sensing a fire.

“We got seventh in the final competitions so we didn’t get scholarships but we hope to do better this year,” Hayes said.

The prototype the team submitted on Apr. 20. is a smart pill dispenser, an invention to target alcohol abusers that take prescription drugs. It is an eight inch circular object that releases pills only after the patient breathes into a breathalyzer to make sure his/her alcohol content is minimal. In case the person has too much alcohol in the blood, the device would not release the medications. The idea behind the project is that alcohol abusers don’t suffer serious damage to his/her health from the combination of alcohol and the medication they take.

This invention won the team the first place out of the 20 teams that received a $1000 grant at the end of 2016 for having the most promising ideas out of all the competitors. As a reward, each individual team member receives a scholarship of $5000 for their later college education. In addition, DHS received $20.000 and the team can decide, how this budget should be used.

By: Lukas Klassen