Olentangy Orange senior demonstrates low‑cost, inclusive brain‑imaging cap and a breath sensor prototype

A senior at Olentangy Orange High School told the Board of Education on Feb. 5 that commonly used functional near‑infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) caps can fail people with thick, curly hair and darker skin, and demonstrated a low‑cost prototype he built to address those shortcomings.

Nicko Bimireddy, a senior, described a failed calibration during an internship at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and said a technician told him the device “was not made for people like me” because his hair kept optodes from contacting the scalp and melanin in his skin reduced the near‑infrared signal. “It became very clear that this cap just wasn't made for me and and people that look like me,” he said.

Bimireddy said he designed an adjustable cap with a rear dial for a tailored fit, 3‑D‑printed optodes that can weave through curls and a material with different absorption properties to improve performance on darker skin. He reported that one prototype cost $13.17 to produce, compared with an example commercial cap that sells for about $500, while acknowledging that “we have to do a cost‑symmetry analysis for larger‑scale manufacturing.”

He said testing of participants with a range of hair types, skin tones and head sizes showed “significant improvements,” and that his design outperformed the existing caps in his experiments. Board members and attendees praised the work and asked about lab affiliations; Bimireddy said he interned at Nationwide Children’s/Wexner Medical Center, plans to major in biomedical engineering in college and intends to continue developing the devices.

Bimireddy also described a second project, a breath‑based volatile organic compound detector he called an Enos device. He said the device uses a local machine‑learning model and costs about $83, can run on a few AAA batteries and operates without an internet connection; he framed it as a low‑cost screening tool for underserved areas.

The presentation drew board praise for student ingenuity and concluded with questions about next steps and opportunities to present the research more widely. The board did not take any formal action on the demonstrations; the session served as a student showcase and a public affirmation of the district’s interest in student research.