Abigail Gonski is not the type of person who doubts herself easily. She is a certified Head Lifeguard and StarGuard Elite Aquatic Safety Instructor who has spent years working at an aquatic facility, training dozens of lifeguards to respond in emergencies. Running CPR drills, supervising pool decks, and teaching the techniques meant to bridge the gap between someone collapsing and someone surviving. And yet she found herself sitting with a question she did not want to say out loud: if an emergency actually happened, a real person, not a mannequin we use for practice, would she get it right?
“Despite all my training, I wasn’t actually sure,” Gonski said. “Mannequins don’t move. They don’t react. They don’t feel the same. If I felt that way, someone who teaches this and knows it better than most people, I would start wondering how every lifeguard, first responder, every person who took a CPR class five years ago feels at that moment.”
That question became the foundation of CardiGlow. In September 2025, Chief Executive Officer Abigail Gonski brought the idea into her entrepreneurship class at Lake Travis High School. Within months, she and her classmates Patrick Rach, Cole Moncada, Riley Johnstone, and Ethan Carryl had developed a startup medical technology company and a working prototype to fill the gap. A wearable device with integrated pressure sensors and color-coded LED lights that guides responders in real time. Green means correct compression depth, red means adjust, and yellow lights blink to maintain rhythm between 100-120 beats per minute (the range recommended by the American Red Cross). CardiGlow currently holds a provisional patent and plans to obtain an official non-provisional patent for CardiGlow in the next one to two years.
Nearly 350,000 Americans suffer from hospital cardiac arrest each year. Only about 10% of those survive. This is not because responders do not attempt CPR; it is because they have no way to assess their compression effectiveness visually. Ultimately, compressions become too shallow, pace drifts quickly, and fatigue sets in within minutes. CardiGlow is designed to close the confidence gap with real-time feedback that works in the chaos of a real emergency, at a fraction of the cost of existing devices that can run up to $20,000 or more.
Patrick Rach, the team’s Chief Financial Officer, said that building a financial model for a product entirely new to the medical industry required looking at the closest existing competitors for guidance.”We looked at how companies like Beaty and the Lucas 3 Compression System handled the financial side of things and took inspiration from the medical field more broadly,” Rach said. “What surprised me most wasn’t the production cost; it was the outside costs, like FDA licensing, insurance, and liability. When lives are at stake, there’s a lot more risk involved, and those costs reflect that.”
Chief Marketing Officer Cole Moncada said one of the biggest challenges has been convincing people their age that CardiGlow is more than just a classroom assignment. “At first, people are usually shocked by the statistics,” Moncada said. “A lot of people assume CPR is way more successful than it actually is.” He also shared that “people see a group of 17 and 18 year olds and think it’s just a little project, but once we show them the prototype, the parent, and everything we’ve built, that changes their perspective.”
Beyond product development, the team has also built a growing social media presence focused on CPR awareness and community storytelling. Through CardiGlow’s Instagram page “@CardiGlowCPR,” the company runs an interview series called “Pulse Check” where they speak with students, lifeguards, and firefighters about CPR knowledge, emergency response, and their personal testimonies. One of the series’ most emotional interviews featured Mark Lear, a captain at the Lake Travis Fire Department, who shares personal experiences from emergency response.
Riley Johnstone, the team’s Chief Technology Officer, emphasized that collaboration behind CardiGlow was just as intentional as the product itself. “Collaboration within the team has been imperative to ensure we are creating a product that is not only viable, but effective, efficient, and accessible to everyone,” Johnstone said.
The team developed Cardiglow through Lake Travis ISD’s INCubatorEDU program and was selected from 50 teams to pitch at Capital Factory, Austin’s premier startup accelerator. They won at the SkillsUSA district competition earlier this year and had a clean sweep in both the Entrepreneurship and Career Pathway – Health Science events. They advanced to the state championship and placed second in Entrepreneurship and first in Career Pathway – Health Science, making them nationals-bound later this year. The Lake Travis Fire Department has since endorsed the product and plan on assisting in early beta testing. Mentor Oscar Lopez, a former firefighter turned tech executive, has guided the team to ensure the glove performs under specific pressures of real emergencies.
The team’s long-term goal is simple: a CardiGlow device in every emergency kit, AED box, classroom, and the hands of responders in the country. For a team of teenagers, that ambition may sound outsized, but the statistics do not care how old you are, and neither does cardiac arrest.
Chief Operations Officer, Ethan Carryl, reinforces this idea, sharing that “if CardiGlow were to even save one life, it means everything. If we could build something that could increase the CPR success rate by one percent, it would make all the difference,” said Carryl.
“CardiGlow does not replace your training; it supplements your response,” Gonski said. “We want it to be there in the moment your training is hardest to trust.”
