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Dan Brown is now an official partner in Sisters of Invention. Mr. Brown had filed a patent on an idea of his own, which was also a system designed to keep babies from being accidentally left in cars. His "real" job as an a partner in the Louisville, KY law firm of Darby and Gazak, P.S.C., as well as his wife Angela, and twins, Jackson and Jenna, kept him busy enough that he didn't have the opportunity to take his idea to fruition. Last summer, Angela Caporelli, another partner, made a presentation to the Louisville Venture Club, and Mr. Brown saw the article in the Lousiville Courier Journal, and decided to get in touch. Given their shared desire to bring this life-saving technology to the market, the partnership seemed to be a great way to share resources and ideas. We welcome Dan Brown's contributions to the partnership, and appreciate that he doesn't mind being a "Sister".
The 9th Anual Maternity Fair at Saint Joseph East 
With over 900 attendees, the Saint Joseph East Maternity Fair, held on May 10th, Mother's Day weekend, was an excellent opportunity for the Sisters of Invention to display the HALO Baby Seat Safety System. The enthusiasm of the expectant parents, and the Saint Joseph Maternity Staff, made it even better.
To view a video of Saint Joseph's planned Women's Center, the state's first and only stand alone facility dedicated to the care of women and children, click here.
Inventor's Council Live at Sunrise
WLEX 10/4/07
Click below to view video
Baby minder
Sisters of Invention, of Lexington, Ky., is taking reservations for its $89 Halo Baby Seat Safety System.
St. Louise Post Distpatch, 8/31/07
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2 Children Die of Heat in Parked Cars in Separate Cases
A 7-month-old infant was found dead in the heat of a parked car Thursday near the Washington University School of Medicine, authorities said. Hours later, a 2-year-old toddler was found dead in a vehicle in a suburb of Cincinnati.
FoxNews.com, 8/24/07
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DON'T THINK IT CAN'T HAPPEN TO YOU
San Francisco Chronicle, 7/27/07
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Six O'clock News
Baby Left in Car
KTVU San Fransisco, CA 7/26/07
video coming soon
Police say Sametta Heyward left her children
in a hot car all day while she worked. AP, 8/1/07
Inventors venture out in search of funding
Louisville Courier Journal, 7/16/07
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Not all inventors look like Thomas Edison
WKYT-TV 4/9/07
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Tonight’s Top Story:
Kids and Safety
WTVQ, 3/11/07
New device will alert driver if child is left in car
Danville Advocate-Messenger, 3/16/0
Sen. Stevens Co-Sponsors Legislation to Improve Child Safety Features in Automobiles
Press Release 3/28/07
Heat Stress From Enclosed Vehicles: Moderate Ambient Temperatures Cause Significant Temperature Rise in Enclosed Vehicles
Pediatrics, 7/1/05
Baby minder By Jeremy Kohler jkohler@post-dispatch.com
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH 08/31/2007
The Child Minder replaces the clip on most infant seat harnesses. It activates a wireless transmitter when fastened. A key-chain alarm sounds when it moves more than 10 feet from the car.
Another company, Sisters of Invention, of Lexington, Ky., is taking reservations for its $89 Halo Baby Seat Safety System. The company plans to sell the device starting in October from its website, www.sistersofinvention.com.
The Halo is a weight-sensing pad in baby seat that beeps a key-chain alarm when the driver moves away. The company plans an upgrade that would also warn passers-by.
"There are 24 million car seats currently out there," said Sally Davisson, a Sisters cofounder. "Since our product works with existing car seats, if even a small percentage of people with car seats bought our product, it's a big market."
A third product, similar to the Halo, was developed at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., after an employee left his 9-month-old son in a hot car in 2000. The baby died.NASA transferred the patent to a private company to make and market the device, a spokesman said.
QUESTION OF NEED
Much depends on how many customers think they need the item, how many can be persuaded to buy, and at what price.
Sierra Cortazzo, 30, who co-owns Kangaroo Kids, a popular Glendale merchant of baby clothes and gear, said as a parent, she wouldn't buy such a gizmo and, as a retailer, probably wouldn't sell one.
She rejects marketing playing on fears of rare tragedies. Twenty-four children in the United States have died this year overheating in cars.
"That's really unfortunate and sad, but think about how many babies there are compared to the numbers that died," she said.
"What about educating parents?" she asked. "Make them aware that this can happen instead of trying to sell them something they don't need."
Some customers, interviewed Thursday, agreed. Deborah Katon, 38, of Maplewood, scoffed at a "fear-based product" that she wouldn't need to keep track of her three kids.
"I count them," she said.
Others saw it as a product they could use. Jen Marciante, 35, of St. Charles, said she'd probably spend $90 on a baby-reminder.
Marciante's life will get hectic next month when she returns to work from maternity leave and 2-month old Eloise, her first child, goes to day care.
"You spend $90 on junk," she said. "I'd probably would buy something like that just for the off-chance that something ... catastrophic would happen."
POWER OF MEDIA
Products can quickly generate buzz on the Internet and suddenly be in demand, said Eric Nemens, 36, Cortazzo's husband and co-owner of Kangaroo Kids. Parents might believe at first that they don't need a baby reminder, but change their minds.
Case in point: the Britax Regent, a behemoth car seat for kids up to 80 pounds that was collecting dust at the store.
"For months, we'd hear, 'That's the biggest, craziest-looking car seat. No way would I buy that,'" said Nemens.
Then came a YouTube video by parents of a boy killed in a crash, asserting that the Regent, with its five-point harness, might have saved their son. More than 2 million people have seen the video, according to YouTube.
When parents around St. Louis caught the video earlier this year, Kangaroo Kids started getting 10 calls a day for seat, he said.
Rest of Story
2 Children Die of Heat in Parked Cars in Separate Cases
On a day when the temperature reached the upper 90s, a woman spotted the baby, called 911 and broke the car window, police Capt. James Gieseke said. The child was pronounced dead at a hospital.
The child had been in the car for three hours, Gieseke said. It's believed the mother left the child in the back seat of the father's car, but that the father thought the mother had taken the child.
"There was a horrible, devastating mix-up as to who was going to take the child to day care," Gieseke said.
Details were still sketchy because the couple were too distraught to give complete statements, Gieseke said.
AP, 8/24/07
Rest of Story
Babies only look clueless — they know a lot more than you think
By Robin Lloyd Updated: 7:26 p.m. ET May 24, 2007
Babies might seem a bit dim in their first six months of life, but researchers are getting smarter about what babies know, and the results are surprising. The word "infant" comes from the Latin, meaning "unable to speak," but babies are building the foundations for babbling and language before they are born, responding to muffled sounds that travel through amniotic fluid. Soon after birth, infants are keen and sophisticated generalists, capable of seeing details in the world that are visible to some other animals but invisible to adults, older children and even slightly older infants.
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A South Carolina mother is charged with homicide by child abuse after police found the bodies of her two children wrapped in garbage bags. Police say Sametta Heyward left her children in a hot car all day while she worked. (Aug. 1)
AP, 8/1/07
Tonight's Top Story
Kids and Safety
WTVQ, Lexington, KY 3/11/07
click below to view video
DON'T THINK IT CAN'T HAPPEN TO YOU
RECIPE FOR DISASTER: Parents' stress and sleep deprivation can be a danger to children
Janine DeFao, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, July 27, 2007
For most parents, it is unthinkable that they could simply forget and leave their child strapped in a car seat for hours. And yet, each year an average of three dozen children nationwide die trapped in overheated cars. Some get into the cars on their own, some are intentionally left by parents, but the majority are forgotten by a parent or caregiver who failed to glance in the backseat.
That apparently was the case Wednesday when Danny Takemoto of Benicia forgot to drop his 11-month-old son, Ian, off at day care. The baby died in the family car outside his father's Concord office.
"The biggest danger is that people think they wouldn't do it," said Janette Fennell, president of Kids and Cars, a Kansas advocacy organization that tracks non-traffic-related child auto deaths.
"We're in this hairy, stressed out, multitasking society. Have you ever gotten in your car and driven to work and didn't know how you got there?
"No one should think it can't happen to them," said Fennell, who added that all kinds of parents, including college professors and PTA presidents, have left their children in cars in recent years with tragic consequences.
It happens most often, experts and advocates said, when there is a change in routine, especially when a parent who doesn't normally drop the child off at day care does so.
While Takemoto was typically the parent who took Ian to his Pleasant Hill day care center on his way to work, he told a staff member there Tuesday that he planned to start bringing the baby later because he had to drop his daughters at soccer practice first. On Wednesday morning, he never showed up. Takemoto found the baby dead in the car that afternoon after his wife called saying the baby wasn't at day care.
Other factors, from stress to sleep deprivation, also can affect a person's memory and functioning. Takemoto reportedly was working long days in his job as an engineer at a Concord cancer research firm.
-- The Halo Baby Seat Safety System, available in November for $89, uses a weight-sensor pad that sounds a keychain alarm and an audible alarm if a child is left in a car seat.
Rest of story
Inventors venture out in search of funding Club's fair can help get new products onto market
By Bill Wolfe
bwolfe@courier-journal.com
The Courier-Journal,
Monday, July 16, 2007
Angela Caporelli and Gary Hettinger want to save lives. Kenneth Lindsey hopes to save water. David Lambert expects to save golf strokes. The four were among eight innovators who put their ideas on display last week at the Venture Club of Louisville's annual Inventors Fair. Inventors too often have an idea, but they sit at home thinking, "If I could only get this out to the public," Venture Club President Robert Brown said. "We're the vehicle for inventors to try to take something out of the closet or out of the basement, to bring it out and show it to potential investors."
Caporelli, one of three Kentucky women who partnered to form Sisters of Invention in 2005, drew attention with the Versailles, Ky., company's HALO child-seat safety system. The device works with standard car seats for infants through toddlers and sounds an alarm if a child is left in the seat when the driver leaves the car.
The women developed the device after a Lexington baby died after being left in a hot car, Caporelli said. Each year brings more deaths and injuries across the country when small children are accidentally left in cars, she said.
Their unit, expected to sell for about $150, would be wirelessly connected to a keychain device that would sound a warning tone if the driver moves farther than 20 feet from the baby seat. "If that goes ignored and there's still a child in the seat, there will be an alarm from the seat saying, "Help! Baby in danger," she said. The alarm would be loud enough to attract passers-by, she said.
Rest of story
New device will alert driver if child is left in car
Danville Advocate Messenger
By BOBBIE CURD email here
3/16/07
A bizarre occurrence this week where a Harrodsburg elementary school teacher apparently forgot to drop off her two young children at daycare, leaving them in her vehicle all day while she worked, may not be so bizarre after all.
Sisters of Invention, a Lexington-based company, was created because of this specific kind of situation. Three women, Sally Davisson, Angela Caporelli and Lisa Sheehy had heard enough about children being accidentally left in vehicles and many actually dying of hypothermia.
The “sisters” currently have a product in the conceptual stage that incorporates multiple sensors on a pad that is placed under the pad of the baby’s car seat. Davisson hopes The Halo Baby Seat will be on the market this year.
The women began the company in August 2005 when a baby-sitter was on trial in the death of an infant left in a vehicle. They did some research and hired engineers to see if the idea was even feasible. “Now we’re working with a local manufacturer, and we think the product can be a lifesaver”, Davisson said.
Interestingly enough, she said, it’s often busy people who simply forget they have children in the car.
Sen. Stevens Co-Sponsors Legislation to Improve Child Safety Features in Automobiles
Press Release
3/28/07
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) today joined Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Senator John Sununu (R-N.H.) in introducing legislation to improve child safety features in new vehicles. The measure, the Kids and Cars Safety Act of 2007, would address issues surrounding vehicles and child safety including backover crashes, injuries resulting from power windows, and deaths when a vehicle inadvertently shifts into motion. “Backover warning systems, auto-reverse power windows, and brake-shift interlocks are simple solutions to improving child safety in and around cars and trucks,” said Senator
Stevens. “These small steps will have a big impact in protecting our children from preventable vehicle hazards, which often lead to tragic injuries and deaths.”
For more information:
http://stevens.senate.gov/
http://www.kidsandcars.org/
Heat Stress From Enclosed Vehicles:
Moderate Ambient Temperatures Cause Significant Temperature Rise in Enclosed Vehicles
Pediatrics,
7/1/06
Catherine McLaren, MD*, Jan Null, CCM and James Quinn, MD*
Each year, children die from heat stroke after being left unattended in motor vehicles. In 2003, the total was 42, up from a national average of 29 for the past 5 years. Previous studies found that on days when ambient temperatures exceeded 86°F, the internal temperatures of the vehicle quickly reached 134 to 154°F.
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