In middle school, TJ Evarts held down an internship with a technology entrepreneur near his hometown of Londonderry, New Hampshire. By the age of 13, TJ and five other teens had the idea for the SMARTwheel™, a device to prevent distracted driving. The following year, TJ presented the SMARTwheel to U.S. President Barack Obama and was offered a pilot study on mass transit vehicles by the U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood. By age 17, TJ and his team were presenting their product on the widely popular U.S. TV show “Shark Tank,” featuring a panel of business executives and entrepreneurs who listen to business pitches and decide whether they should invest. And just months after TJ will graduate from high school, his team’s patented product will become commercially available. Not bad for a kid who hasn’t even gone to college yet.
“We only have one chance here to make it on this Earth, so why not start early?” said TJ, the SMARTwheel CEO and CTO. “Every kid has the ability to do amazing things. It’s just taking that first step to train yourself in what you’re interested in and then have the drive to move it forward.”
TJ has always had an interest in electronics, and no doubt is driven to turn his passion into a potentially life-saving device. In 2010, TJ, along with his siblings, Jaiden and Breyton Evarts and three friends became world champions in FIRST® LEGO® League, a competition for 9 to 14 year olds challenging students to find real world solutions to real world problems. The team called themselves The Inventioneers®, and set out to tackle the growing issue of distracted driving.
“The people who were the most affected by distracted driving are the people in our peer group, and that is what really resonated with us,” said TJ. “We wanted to create a device that would help correct driver behaviors before it is too late.”
Like any good group of entrepreneurs, the team saw a market inefficiency.
“We found most distractions are connected by one thing: The driver must take one or both hands off the steering wheel. We were surprised there was no device out there that tried to capture that data and use it, so there was a huge opportunity to be able to use this technology to train drivers,” said TJ.
The team set out to build a device that would fit around a steering wheel and be able to detect a driver’s hand position. Through TI technology, the SMARTwheel will warn the driver through visual and audio alerts when his or her hands are not in the right place, recording to a smartphone app the moments when a driver appears to be distracted.
“The TI eZ430-RF256x Bluetooth development evaluation board is the core of our device. It’s the brain that runs our proprietary software to determine distracted driving, when and how distracted driving occurs, record the events and send alerts,” said TJ. “It allows us to take all of the recorded incidents and transmit them to our companion mobile app so drivers, parents of teenager drivers or companies with fleets of vehicles can analyze the information, track issues and identify areas for improvement.”
TJ said he started using TI technology in middle school and chose it for the SMARTwheel because of its ease of use, low-power capabilities (the SMARTwheel runs on batteries), the data sheets provided online and the TI E2E forums to get quick answers to his technical questions.
“We want to make it simple to connect devices. Bluetooth technology is everywhere, so we make sure our Bluetooth technology is easy to use from high schoolers to a start-up company in a garage to Fortune 500 technology companies,” said Chloe Waller, Product line manager for the TI SimpleLink™ Bluetooth CC2564 dual mode product line.
The SMARTwheel will be available in August on their website, and is expected to be in retail and online stores early next year. And TJ said if you want a seal of approval, look no further than the President of the United States.
“President Obama said he liked the idea so much he wanted one for his daughters [Sasha and Malia] when they get old enough to drive,” said TJ.