BATON ROUGE — A group of LSU graduate students developed a car seat alarm system to prevent the risk of heatstroke of children left in hot vehicles.

Victoria Irondi, Nnamdi Dike and Trevor Perrault developed a car seat alert system designed to prevent accidental child abandonments in vehicles. Their invention uses a weight-based sensor placed under a car seat. A corresponding fob, attached to a key ring, alerts the driver if they begin to walk away from the vehicle with a child still inside.

The students were recognized Tuesday by the Louisiana Highway Safety Commission and the Louisiana Passenger Safety Task Force for their innovative work.

"There's a lot of distractions today, so it's just something to protect all of the babies as much as we can," Irondi said. "This is more than anything that we could have expected to come from this project, so we're just really happy we could create something that could make this much of an impact."

Officials say as the temperatures rise in places such as South Louisiana, the risk of heatstroke for children left in cars increases.

"Since 1998, we've lost over 1,000 children in the United States due to being left in vehicles," said Bridget Gardner, a registered nurse at University Medical Center, LCMC Health, said.

The urgency of the issue was highlighted recently when a Hammond man was accused of leaving his 21-month-old daughter in a car for nine hours, leading to a murder charge. St. Tammany Parish officials reported 35-year-old Joseph Boatman had been drinking.

"Don't think it can't happen to you," Gardner warned. "Because many children that were left in vehicles unintentionally — that's exactly what those parents said."