Our Story | Why I Invented the Stall Rescue Tool®
My parents were in their late 70's and were beginning to experience serious health issues. I began taking notice of not only their struggles but the challenges of others in their age group. This began to weigh heavily on my mind; I wanted to do something to help.
I've always been somewhat of an inventor; I was constantly fiddling around with stuff to improve its function. I was certain I could invent something that would either improve a senior's quality of life or some type of device that would help them in their time of need.
It occurred to me that if someone should be in a bathroom stall and become distressed, there was not a quick and efficient method to come to their aid. I knew that people with cognitive challenges would often suffer periods of forgetfulness. What if my mom or someone with her type of memory challenges became disoriented in a bathroom and began to panic? How many people pass out from diabetic shock, suffer heart attacks, or have a stroke in a bathroom?
I began to study the architecture of bathroom stalls, the locks, the doors and the structure itself. Was climbing under or over a door the only way to reach someone in distress? I noticed that with few exceptions there is a gap between the stall door and the partition. This is a tolerance built in to allow installers to hang doors without interference. I also observed that some type of offset lever could be designed to fit in the door gap and displace the lock. That is exactly what I did; I built a prototype offset lever and began to test it.
Once I determined that my prototype tool would work on most of the doors I tried, I then began an extensive patent search, and promptly filed a patent application. It literally required years of research, testing and improving on my invention before I had a tool that would work on the majority of bathroom stall door locks in use today. After all of that work, the STALL RESCUE TOOL® was born.
During the time I was refining my first responder tool, a crisis seemed to envelope our country: opioid addiction and a surge in overdose deaths. I honestly hadn't considered this concern when I invented the tool. I have since become horrified to learn that tens of thousands of people die each year from an overdose death, many of them overdosing in bathroom stalls.
It was clear to us that our tool might very well serve as an apparatus to help save some of these people. We decided to launch a donation campaign a few months after we started our company. We wanted to get as many of our tools into first responders' hands as quickly as we could. We started projecting our message on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, asking people to help us with our crusade.
Shortly after we started, we learned that our STALL RESCUE TOOL® was used in a successful rescue of a distressed person in a Springfield, Virginia hotel bathroom by a local fire department. We had delivered a donated tool to them only a couple of weeks before the rescue. Beaming with pride, we knew our dream of providing something that would make a difference was finally realized.
