Originally published by NBC 9 Denver.

BOULDER – A 17-year-old Boulder High School student has been awarded a $50,000 grant to build a firearm that knows who’s firing it via the user’s fingerprint.

“After the mass shooting at the Aurora movie theater in 2012, I started thinking about the role technology could play in preventing accidents and death related to firearms,” Kai Kloepfer said. “The idea actually came to me in a dream, and I have been working since then to make it a reality.”

The grant comes from Silicon Valley’s Smart Tech Challenges Foundation as part of the $1M Firearms Challenge, which aims to improve firearm safety.

The sensor that Kloepfer is working on boasts a 99-percent success rate – even with partial prints, according to a news release from the Smart Tech Challenges Foundation. This sensor could allow gun owners to program who can fire their weapon, theoretically preventing children from accidentally discharging firearms, as well as stopping criminals from turning guns on their owners.

An early version of the technology was the top engineering project by an American student at the 2013 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair – placing Kloepfer in the top 34 out of 7 million students.

This version was built on a $3,000 budget. With the grant, Kloepfer hopes to integrate his technology into a live firearm.

Kloepfer is speaking at TEDxMileHigh this weekend. For more information, go to http://www.tedxmilehigh.com/.