Take your child to work week certainly paid off for Efim Sherbakov, an Ohio physical therapist whose son, Sam, invented a device to aid persons with amputations for an eighth-grade science project. Sam is a mechanically inclined sophomore at Revere High School, Richfield, Ohio.
The idea struck the 15-year-old while watching his father work with a patient who was struggling with his pin suspension. “His patient was putting on a prosthetic leg, and when he stood up he fell, because the pin didn’t go in correctly,” Sam was quoted as saying in an article on wkyc.com. “That gave me the idea to put a proximity switch in, which will sense the pin when it goes in. It will activate a light or buzzer. So people who are visually impaired will know when the light or buzzer are on.”
Sam said that it makes him feel good to help people. He has secured a provisional patent on the device and says that he hopes to make his invention commercially viable.
