Four Taipei Tech graduate students have won a Red Dot Award for a design concept with an idea that improves buses' emergency window-breaking mechanisms.

The design, named “Corner Breaker,” was developed by Chiu Kai-hsin, Chang Keng-tzu, Yang Chu-ting and Teng Pei-chih, students from the Graduate Institute of Innovation and Design at Taipei Tech.

The team’s design was one of seven submitted by students from the university that were selected for the prestigious design awards, from a total of nearly 5,000 entries from around the world.

Teng said that he had read in the news that about 40 percent of public bus drivers in Taiwan lock their vehicles’ emergency hammers so that they are not stolen by passengers.

After discovering that the most severe injuries in many bus accidents were suffered by passengers who had difficulty escaping from the vehicle, Teng said he and his teammates decided to try to improve the device by turning it into something that is not just easy to handle, but also triggers an alert "when it is touched by mistake."

Elderly people and youngsters often have trouble using the emergency hammers to break bus windows when there is an accident, Teng said.

The team was inspired by the mechanism used in mousetraps after they saw a student getting caught in such a trap, Teng said.

The team created a spring-action handle-like device designed to be installed in the corner of a bus window, with the elasticity of the returning spring providing force to a bolt inside the device that can break a bus window at the most accurate spot, Teng said.

"Saving lives in a safe, efficient and energy-saving way" was the motivation for the work, the team said in its presentation of the device.