Patient 7th-Grade Inventor: The Winning Brainchild

Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention. And so it was that seventh-grader Cam Raines of Sandersville, Ga., came up with the idea for the “Vein Detector,” a device that wraps around a patient’s arm to dilate a vein before receiving a shot. Cam, who has cystic fibrosis, said inspiration came while spending 183 days in the hospital last year. “I had to have IV’s all the time,” she said. “They were always missing my vein.” She was among ninenational winners--one from each grade from kindergarten through eighth--in this year’s Invent America! competition, sponsored by the nonprofit U.S. Patent Model Foundation. The winning inventions will be displayed next month at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. Other winners include kindergartner Sage Wisniewski of Waldorf, Md., whose “Sur-Footer” helps small children tell their left foot from their right, and second-grader Lillian Ruth Lucas of Arlington, Mass., the brains behind the “Puddle Detecting Cane,” which alerts a blind person to puddles in his path.