A martial arts drill, a friend suddenly short of breath, and the one thing that would help him buried somewhere in a bag full of gear. That was the scene an eighth grader named Akhil Gandikota watched play out, and it stayed with him. He told Society for Science, “I thought about if I was in the same place.” His conclusion was blunt: “Rummaging through a completely packed back for a small inhaler would be extremely frightening.”

We are not doctors, respiratory therapists, or medical researchers, and nothing here is medical advice. This is a piece of reporting on a student’s project and the wider research it touches. The one success figure attached to the device is self-reported, not independently tested, so treat it as a student’s result and not as clinical evidence.

What he actually built

Akhil, a student at Stoller Middle School, didn’t reinvent the medicine. He rethought where it lives. His Emergency Wristwatch Inhaler mounts on a wristwatch or a fitness tracker. The idea is simple: the thing you reach for in a panic is already strapped to your arm, not lost at the bottom of a bag.

He went through three versions to get there. By the third, he reported a success rate near 100 percent, and he was already working on a fourth. The project earned him the Lemelson Early Inventor Prize, a $100 award given to middle schoolers who spot a problem in their community and build something to solve it.

Why the wrist is the real idea

The clever part here isn’t the chemistry. It’s the location.

An inhaler only helps if you can get to it in the seconds you need it, and the backpack story is exactly the failure Akhil designed around. Putting the device on the wrist turns “where did I leave it” into “it’s right here.”

There’s a second reason the instinct is sound. Even when people do find their inhaler, many of them don’t use it correctly. A 2016 review in the journal CHEST pulled together 144 studies covering more than 54,000 patients and found that only about a third of patients used the correct technique, a problem that hadn’t improved in 40 years. That matters, because using an inhaler wrong means less of the medicine actually reaches the lungs.

None of this proves one student’s prototype works. But it does explain why “make the device easier to reach and use” is a genuinely useful goal. Asthma is common in kids: the CDC says around 6.5 percent of US children currently have it.

What “near 100 percent” does and doesn’t tell you

We’d pump the brakes on the headline number. A near-100-percent success rate sounds definitive, but as far as we can tell it comes from a middle schooler’s own testing, with no independent evaluation, no clinical trial, and no patent.

What’s easy to endorse is the mindset. Akhil said what struck him afterward was “how much research and hard work went into the simple design,” and that he wanted to make “contributions to the medical field, even without being a professional.” Winning the prize, he said, made him want to “make the inhaler the best it can be and make the world a better place.”

If asthma or another chronic condition is part of your family’s life, a doctor or pharmacist is the right person to talk to about how to carry and use an inhaler correctly.