At 13, she invented a device that can detect a fire before it starts. Meet California girl whose life-saving creation was triggered by a tragedy

Home fires, commercial blazes, and sudden mall outbreaks frequently stem from unmonitored cooking equipment, faulty electrical wiring, or overheating appliances—tragedies that often unfold in mere seconds. Understanding these hidden hazards inspired 13-year-old California resident Shanaya Gill to take decisive action against early fire detection gaps. Driven to prevent future disasters after witnessing a restaurant being burned down to ashes, the young innovator, now 15, engineered a revolutionary device designed to detect potential fire hazards before flames even start to spread.

A tragedy prompted an invention

According to a report by Time magazine, Shanya and her family watched the restaurant ravaged by the fire in San Jose, California. The incident left her mother paranoid, who started double-checking whether the stove was turned off. Shanya understood that unattended cooking was the leading cause of home fires and smoke detectors weren’t always effective in providing an immediate warning.

This realisation led Shanya to create a device, using a thermal camera and a small computer to detect unattended heat sources. After 2 minutes if the device doesn’t detect humans nearby, it sends a text to the particular individual, warning them of a potential fire. ‘What I realized is that ... I could learn how to code, and I could really make a change,” she had shared.

From science competition to national recognition

Beyond her initial prototype, the young innovator’s breakthrough earned her top honors at the Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge, one of the nation’s premier science competitions for middle school students. Her vision quickly caught the attention of national leaders.

During a visit to the U.S. Fire Administration headquarters, Shanya connected with Administrator Lori Moore-Merrell. Recognized for its potential to save lives, the federal agency is now actively assisting her in securing funding to scale the technology for widespread public use beyond its current single-home trial setting.

She keeps improving her life-saving invention

Continuous refinement remains at the heart of her project. While presenting in Washington, D.C., Shanya realized that integrating artificial intelligence would drastically boost the system's processing speed compared to her original Python codebase.

Rather than locking her invention behind a patent, she took a collaborative approach by publishing the code directly to GitHub. By keeping the software open-source, she invites developers worldwide to help troubleshoot bugs, optimize performance, and turn a personal passion project into a globally accessible safety standard.

How AI helped the young innovator

The journey from a home experiment to a commercial venture took a major leap when Shanaya officially launched her AI-driven safety startup, Vigil, in 2025, aiming to scale the device for mass manufacturing. Developing the technology required a steep learning curve, which she navigated by pairing dual browser screens with ChatGPT to ask continuous questions and receive tailored coding guidance, as per Forbes.

Artificial intelligence also reshaped how the device operates, eliminating the need to manually program specific features into the software. Today, Vigil pairs standard cameras with thermal imaging to monitor environments in real time, delivering instant alerts before a potential hazard escalates into a crisis.