Teen invents device to catch Speeders - This Post - External Link

Parents who warn their teenagers about the dangers of speeding will have another tool at their disposal when a product that monitors car speed hits the market this fall.

The palm-sized device was developed by a Lunenburg High School student entering his senior year. Jonathan Fischer, 18, hopes his invention will facilitate communication between parents and teenagers and prevent young drivers from speeding and swerving on treacherous rural roads.

The device, which plugs into the electrical outlet in a car and sits on the dashboard, will monitor a car’s speed only when the driver exceeds a specified limit.

Speed-Demon is not the first speed monitor, but it is the first product that tracks speed only when drivers exceed a limit that parents or someone else can set, instead of tracking speed and location all the time.

Mr. Fischer, who started developing Speed-Demon before he received his own driver’s license in February 2005, wrote a software program for the device that uses global positioning technology to log the time and location of every speeding incident.

He is developing two models. One uses a Secure Digital card that can be inserted into a computer after a teenager comes back from a drive; the other would use wireless technology to send mobile phone or e-mail messages to parents immediately after a speeding incident.

“Whoever owns it will be able to customize the speeding alerts to be however strict they want to be,” Mr. Fischer said.

His program will let Speed-Demon users view a Google map of the time, location and path of the car when the speeding occurred. If no speeding occurs, parents will not be able to see the path of the car at any time.

This is what Mr. Fischer is most proud of. His program weeds out extra information from the GPS, protecting teens’ privacy. Their parents can see what they’re doing only if they break the rules set by the parents.

“Some people think (my plan) is bad, and I’m on the parents’ side,” he said. “Teens should still be able to have their privacy — and they’ll get it if they drive safely. It’s not so much to get kids in trouble as it is to open lines of communication with parents.”

State Rep. Karyn E. Polito, R-Shrewsbury, an advocate of increasing parental involvement for junior operators applying for a driver’s license, said devices such as Speed-Demon are “on the right track.”

Any tool that that can help parents to promote safe driving is a good thing, Ms. Polito said. “I do think parental involvement is an essential component to making better young drivers,” she said.

Glenn Greenberg, a spokesman for Liberty Mutual Research Institute for Safety, said it is important for parents and teenagers to talk about driving patterns.

“Environments in which parents and teenagers openly discuss driving — just like they talk about other social behaviors, like drinking and drugs — are situations where teens are more likely to exhibit safe driving habits,” Mr. Greenberg said.

Teenage drivers are the age group proven most likely to be in automobile accidents. And in rural towns such as Lunenburg, narrow, winding roads are less forgiving to speeding drivers than broad highways.

According to research earlier this year by the University of Massachusetts Traffic Safety Research Program in Amherst, drivers from 16 to 19 have the highest crash rates per licensed driver in Massachusetts, while 16- and 17-year-old drivers have a crash involvement rate four times higher than that of drivers 18 and older.

The rate of speeding violations was four times higher for 16-year-olds than for drivers of all other ages.

“There have been a lot of car accidents in our town involving high school students,” Mr. Fischer said. “A lot of them have gotten hurt or killed. I know kids who’ve gotten killed.”

The young inventor said he has always had a mind for business. So he put his business mind and technology skills together to prevent more of his peers from dying in crashes caused by recklessness and speeding.

Some private companies use GPS devices to track workers such as couriers, garbage truck or snowplow operators. Mr. Fischer’s device is targeted specifically at parents of teenage drivers.

Mr. Fischer presented the Speed-Demon project as a nervous teenager at the Worcester Regional Science & Engineering Fair in spring 2005. Then he entered the Mount Wachusett Community College Business Plan Competition last fall.

One of the youngest applicants in the competition, he came away with first place, winning $6,000 cash, plus services valued at about $5,000 to help him develop his idea into a marketable product.

After his success at MWCC, Mr. Fischer applied to the Plan for the Future competition sponsored by the National Federation of Independent Business. In June, he went to Washington, D.C., to collect $7,500 — the grand prize.

Christopher C. Bowman, a civil service commissioner for Massachusetts, was one of the judges at the MWCC competition who applauded Mr. Fischer’s business plan.

Mr. Bowman said he was impressed by Mr. Fischer’s creativity and his ability to compete with older, more experienced entrepreneurs. He said the business plan for the Speed-Demon stood out from the pool of applicants because it was a product designed to help people and encourage public safety.

Mr. Bowman, who at the time of the competition was chief of staff to Ranch C. Kimball, state secretary of economic development, helped set up a meeting between Mr. Fischer and Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey.

Mr. Fischer said Ms. Healey seemed genuinely interested in the Speed-Demon.

“I got to talk to her for 10 minutes,” he said. “One of her aides said she couldn’t believe (Ms. Healey) talked to me for so long.”

Coached by his father, small business owner Richard Fischer, Jon Fischer, now a confident young adult, is focusing all the time he can spare on this business venture.

Richard Fischer said Speed-Demon has always been a family effort. While Richard provides Jon with business advice, Jon’s sister, Julie, 21, helped coin the device’s name, and Jon’s uncle, Kurt Lanza, helped with the computer programming.

“I remember some of those nights in the dark with that thing flying around,” Richard Fischer said, laughing and pointing to their oldest prototype of the Speed-Demon. “Those nights were ugly.”

Two years after Speed-Demon was born, the situation is different.

“A lot of people have said they want one for their kids,” Richard Fischer said. “They like the sound of it.”

Brett N. Dorny, Jon Fischer’s patent lawyer, who works in Northboro, said Speed-Demon is “the first design modeled to monitor specific driving conditions.”

Mr. Dorny helped Mr. Fischer file a patent application for his design. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office should approve the patent by next summer, Mr. Dorny said.

With the patent pending, the Fischers are working with three partners — Sine-Wave Technologies Inc. of Hopkinton, of which Richard Fischer is an owner; Innovatech Associates Inc. of Westford; and Fastrax Ltd. of Vantaa, Finland — to provide them with the hardware to develop the Speed-Demon.

They plan to sell the device on Mr. Fischer’s Web site, www.speed-demon.com, which is in development.

Pricing is expected to be about $150 for the original model, and about $200 to $250 for the wireless model, plus a $10 monthly fee for the wireless technology.

Mr. Fischer has had to balance his business venture with schoolwork and frequent practice as a member of a competitive freestyle skiing team. Speed-Demon is important to him but, he admitted, “it got in the way of skiing.”

Mr. Fischer hopes Speed-Demon is the start of a career of business ventures.

He will graduate from high school in 2007 and wants to study business administration in college. But he might take a year off to work on Speed-Demon.

“I’ve always been more interested in the business side of things than the engineering side. I’ve always been interested in money,” Mr. Fischer said, perhaps a tribute to his father.

His father wants Jon to attend college, but he is also encouraging him to work independently on his business ideas.

“He can learn a lot more about business by developing a business than by going to college,” Richard Fischer said.