Barrington Girl an Inventor at Age 10

There will be at least one real invention on display at this year’s Invention Convention and Science Fair at St. Luke’s School in Barrington. 

Katrina Diel, a Barrington fifth-grader at St. Luke’s with Type 1 diabetes, will display her KEDZ Covers – an injection-molded polypropylene plastic cover for an OmniPod insulin pump. She thought of the invention a few months after she starting wearing the wireless pump. 

“You know, being a girl, she wanted it to look pretty,” said her mother, Kimberly Diel, of the insulin pump. 

Katrina began doing some research online and found that the only things out there to decorate the OmniPod were stickers that get thrown away every three days when she starts a new pump – at $8 a sticker. She also wanted something that “would look cool in fun colors to match her clothes,” she said.

Katrina came up with the idea of a decorative cover that could snap on top of the insulin pump. She drew up a design for prototype. Her father, Fred Diel, took the design to a friend who runs a manufacturing company in Massachusetts. That company made a prototype.

“It couldn’t interfere with the functioning of the pump,” he said. “And we didn’t want to add weight to the pod.”

Katrina wears her pump on the triceps of her arm, where it doesn’t interfere when she dances or swims. She simply snaps on a new cover to decorate and protect the pod.

Katrina picked out the colors for the covers: fuscia (pink), flame red, spring green, Baltic blue, honey beige and mushroom. They are being sold for $19.99 each with a portion of every sale being donated to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation and Camp Surefire – a camp for kids with diabetes.

Katrina also drew up the logo for the Barrington company that is manufacturing and selling the covers. She also came up with name, which is an acronym of her full name: Katrina Elisabeth Diel with the letter “Z” tacked on the end.

You can find more information online at the website (www.kedzcovers.com) and on Facebook and Twitter.