Three students built a wearable designed to help protect children from aggressive stray dogs.

For a child walking alone, an encounter with an aggressive stray dog can become dangerous within seconds. Ihsaan K S of Government Engineering College Idukki, Shreyansh Jain of IIIT Nagpur and Ritik Gupta of IIT Indore chose that very human safety problem as their engineering brief.

Their goal was not to build another handheld gadget that a frightened child would have to remember to activate. They set out to create something wearable, automatic and designed around the child.

The result was the Wearable Dog Deterrent Device. The team designed it to detect and deter an approaching aggressive dog, with dynamic frequency adjustment and 360-degree coverage built into the concept.

The project was developed during InventX, Maker Bhavan Foundation's six-week residential programme at IIT Gandhinagar. InventX pushes student teams beyond presentations and into working, patent-ready prototypes.

The device won first prize at InventX 2026. More importantly, it demonstrates a powerful kind of student innovation: three young engineers from three different institutions joining forces around a problem visible on ordinary Indian streets.

The product will still need careful real-world testing for safety and effectiveness. But the instinct behind it is already worth celebrating—notice a problem, build a thoughtful response and put the user's reality at the centre.