A West Limerick second-level student has devised a treatment that she hopes will aid the fight against bed bugs. Sophie Keane from Desmond College, Newcastle West, has invented a product that draws in and traps bed bugs by mimicking the human heartbeat and temperature. Such is its efficacy that the young inventor has already applied for a patent for the product.
At the weekend, Sophie won the Best Product Award at the BD STEM Stars Awards in Limerick. “What this is,” she explained, “is an effective medical solution for bed bug removal.”
“It has human-like features in that it replicates a heartbeat through a simple circuit, and it also has our body temperature through these brass rod inserts. And it works by just flicking a switch.
“You can leave it in a room after heating the brass rods on a radiator or just hot water. And you can leave it there overnight, or half an hour, basically however long you feel the need to, based on your infestation.”
The device is already proving a hit with consumers. “An Airbnb host reached out to me. She was suffering with bed bugs and she used my device compared to a normal glue trap and she saw that my results were triple and quadruple the amount that people were achieving using common methods.”
Sophie is now waiting on her patent. “It’s pending at the moment. And after that I want to develop different prototypes for my project. Maybe ones that can be stationary and plugged in, ones for commercial use in aeroplanes and trains and hotels.”
Held at the BD RCI (Research Centre Ireland) – a global Centre of Excellence in the develop-ment of innovation and technologies to elevate bioscience discovery and diagnostics – site at the National Technology Park, Limerick, the seventh annual awards were presented by Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, James Lawless.