12-Year-Old Moroccan Inventor Wins Prize for Smart COVID Mask Design

29 March 2021 – byGinette · 1 min read

The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed many researchers and inventors in Morocco, including the young Bilal Hammouti whose intelligence and creativity command admiration. At only 12 years old, this young boy is the inventor of several electronic devices, including a mask.

This latest invention earned him the first prize in the "future engineers" category at an international competition. Interviewed live on 2M, Bilal said the idea for such an invention came to him because he often found himself in the presence of people who take pleasure in lowering their masks to cough or sneeze. "This causes the droplets to disperse and thus accelerates the transmission rate of the disease if they are infected with Covid-19. So I thought of this mask that offers comfort to the wearer and closes automatically as soon as it detects that the person is about to sneeze or cough, which prevents the transmission of the virus. It took me several months to design it," reports 2M.

Dubbed the "Mask of the Future", the device is composed of a standard mask, supported by a robot that detects movement and automatically raises it to cover the mouth and nose whenever the wearer is about to cough or sneeze.

Bilal Hammouti has big ambitions and hopes to find support "to work on improving his inventions, making them concrete and accessible to all".