CARROLL VALLEY, Pa. — Meet Sarah and Emma Simmons - two sisters with a passion for STEM and a specialty in biomedical engineering.
“Even though we’re twins, and we do have different ways of thinking, we’re both able to contribute ideas to make and find good solutions to our project and any problems we had,” explained Sarah.
The fourteen-year-olds have competed in STEM competitions since the fourth grade.
They won the York-Adams Science and Engineering Fair earlier this year, as well as the Federick County STEM Fair and Broadcom Masters National in previous years.
Both their mom and dad have doctorates.
Over the past 8 months, they’ve focused their efforts on developing a device to help people living with upper respiratory problems.
“We would explain our ideas and then we would look at the pros and cons of each of the ideas and choose the one that we felt was the most logical and reasonable for the project,” explained Emma.
The pair built a prototype to measure a person’s pulmonary functions and stream data to physicians during telemedicine appointments; it also has a pulse oximeter.
The twins competed against 20 other groups at Governor Shapiro's recent stem competition, an annual event that challenges student teams from across the state and came out on top.
“There [was] a lot of people who also want to change the world. They want to engineer, they want to challenge themselves and so that was a lot of fun,” Sarah said,
The twins expect to compete in two more events this summer and pursue a patent for their project in the future.
“It’s definitely worth looking into and spending the time and working hard [to make] it into a reality,” Emma said.