RUMFORD – Children have seen it all when it comes to sneakers: innovations like Velcro and flashy features like blinking lights. A Rumford native is betting that her invention will be the next great thing.

Lynn Mercier Root, 40, hopes children across America will soon be striding everywhere in her patented Bubble Shoe.

“I just think that this would be fun footwear for the whole family,” said Root, who now lives in Flagler Beach, Fla., and spends summers in Rumford. “Everybody loves bubbles. Children love bubbles.”

The offbeat shoes work on the air system principle, and, unlike light-up shoes, do not require batteries.

Just fill the shoe with bubble solution, go for a stroll and the fun begins. Tucked inside the heel of a Bubble Shoe is a bubble-generating component composed of one-way air and nozzle valves.

“The shoe has an opening where you pour the bubble solution into a self-contained holder. Then, as you walk, pressure causes the bubbles to come out of the shoe,” Root said.

Root, who graduated from Rumford High School in 1981, has promised the first manufactured pair of Bubble Shoes to her 18-month-old daughter, Scenic, who “is a little shoe freak and loves to blow bubbles.”

Her original design for the Bubble Shoe was submitted to Invention Submission Corp. and is currently available for licensing and sale to manufacturers or marketers, said ISC spokeswoman Jennifer Mullen.

For Root, a radiation therapist who works with cancer patients at Florida Hospital in Ormand Beach, Fla., the Bubble Shoe is her first invention.

“I had a couple of dreams about it and came up with it in December 1999 and here it is in 2003. I’m hoping to release it everywhere once we get the advertising out there,” Root said Thursday.