When Maria Sears set out to build a medical device, she wasn’t working in a lab at MIT or shadowing researchers in a major city hospital. She was a high school student in Monte Vista, Colorado, a rural town better known for agriculture than engineering, using borrowed tools, sheer determination, and a powerful personal connection to guide her work. This year, Maria was honored as the Colorado BioScience Institute’s Future of Life Sciences Award recipient (Senior Division) for her innovative project: a wearable device that monitors pulmonary function by tracking heart rate and respiratory rate in real time. She not only built the device, but also coded the software and designed an accompanying app to help patients and providers use the data to inform preventative care decisions. “Chronic pulmonary diseases like asthma or cystic fibrosis can change a person’s life overnight,” Maria explains. “One day you’re fine, and the next you’re struggling to breathe. I wanted to build something that helps catch those shifts before they become emergencies.” Maria’s inspiration came from her own experience living with asthma, and from seeing the challenges her grandmother, who relies on oxygen, faces daily. Her sister, a respiratory therapist, also influenced her thinking and encouraged her to pursue a project focused on pulmonary health. Maria’s device tracks key vital signs and could eventually help patients, particularly in rural areas like her own, catch early warning signs before a condition escalates. “Where I live, we don’t even have a hospital in town. Just a small clinic,” she says. “If someone gets really sick, they might need to be flown to Denver. A tool like this could help people take action sooner and avoid that level of crisis.” Maria’s journey into biomedical technology began just a year earlier, when she designed a fall detection device […]