HeatSentry is an automatic hot-car safety system. This page is for partners, journalists, pediatric offices, and anyone evaluating us before responding to a cold email.
HeatSentry is being built by a small team that has spent time around the same problem from two angles: software for caregivers of young children, and hardware that goes into vehicles. The hot-car death toll — on average 38 children and hundreds of pets every year in the United States — is not a new statistic, and the working-memory failure mode behind it is well documented. What is missing is a hardware layer that closes the loop on a disrupted morning without depending on the caregiver remembering to install an app, opt in to a service, or carry a second device.
HeatSentry is a back-seat occupant-and-temperature sensor that watches the cabin and escalates alerts the same way regardless of which life is at risk: driver alert first, then emergency contacts, then 911 if no one responds. The product is shaped by the same forgetfulness framing that drives our research study, and the research study is shaped by what a real caregiver population will and will not put up with. Both sides of that loop are running in parallel.
The 38-per-year statistic has held steady for two decades — the problem is not awareness, it is hardware.
The forgetfulness SMS study is an in-field research partnership with caregivers of children under five, scoped to 40 participants total across Florida, Texas, and California. Those three states were chosen because they sit at the intersection of high year-round cabin-temperature risk and large caregiver populations reachable through pediatric practices and daycare networks — the two referral channels we already know work for this age band.
For five consecutive weekdays each participant receives one short text message in the morning with a single yes-or-no question about that day's back-seat check. The protocol requires no app, no login, and no new habit between prompts. We measure four outcomes: completion rate across the five days, perceived intrusion at study close, behavior change — whether the participant added a back-seat cue or a daycare-arrival confirmation in response, and the correlation between disrupted-routine days and next-morning self-reported adherence. The full protocol and outcomes are described in the second post on our blog. Aggregate results will be published on the Safety Stats page as the data comes in.
External memory beats muscle memory on a disrupted morning — every time.
The first partnership conversation we are having is with the ASPCA, because the failure mode behind pet hot-car deaths is structurally identical to the failure mode behind child hot-car deaths — a back-seat sensor that protects a child does not need a second SKU to also watch a rear cargo area. The second conversation is with Safe Kids Worldwide, because their network already reaches the caregiver populations we are trying to study and the families that most benefit from a hardware intervention. The third is with pediatric practices, where a single recommendation from a clinician at a well-child visit reaches the right household at the right moment.
Three partnership shapes fit HeatSentry's roadmap: a small pilot with your membership to validate the dual-life sensor design against a real caregiver population; a co-published guidance piece that carries both your logo and ours in front of both audiences; and a co-distribution relationship that puts HeatSentry in front of your members at the moment of year they need it most. None of these require exclusivity, and none require a contract longer than a single summer to evaluate. If your organization works on child or pet hot-car safety, the partnership intake page is the right place to start.
One sensor, one deployment channel, two audiences that already share the same risk profile — the partnership has to start there.
For interviews, background briefings, embargoed early findings from the SMS study, or comments on the underlying statistics, the right address is heatsentry-os@polsia.app. Briefing materials and a founder interview are available on request; we respond to media inquiries within one business day. For general partnership questions — pilots, co-publication, distribution — please use the same address and include the word "partnership" in the subject line so the right person picks it up. For anything else, the structured contact form is the faster path.
For the underlying numbers behind the research framing and the partnership case, see the Safety Stats page. For the day-by-day study protocol and the ASPCA partnership rationale, see the blog. To join the SMS study as a participant, add yourself to the waitlist.