Texas Instruments hosted an awards ceremony for the inaugural 2010 Beagle Board Open Source Design Challenge. The challenge was to create the best design around TI’s Beagle Board using open source embedded Linux. Teams of up to four students competed, posting their design on the TI wiki and submitting a team video introducing their project. UT Engineering undergraduates Jackie Leverett (BME) and Zach Wasson (ECE) won first place. Their project, called Project Smart Pill Box, is a visual verification system that utilizes face detection and primitive hand tracking to ensure that patients with memory pathologies, such as Alzheimer’s, successfully take their medications. Their Smart Pill Box can be used as an alarm, but unlike conventional pill minders on the market today, the prototype requires visual proof of a patient taking pills out of the box and lifting them up to their mouths. This would prevent patients from getting distracted while taking their medicine, which could result in skipping a dose or accidentally taking it twice.

The Beagle Board Open Source Challenge from Texas Instruments (TI) is a contest that offers University of Texas at Austin (UT) students the opportunity to implement an innovative idea on an ARM Cortex-A8 processor-based system in the form of a practical application. Students were given some mentorship assistance by TI engineers as well as learning to interact with other developers in the open source community that has gathered around the BeagleBoard.

The results of the world wide vote were tallied and the winners are:

First Place
Smart Pill Box
Jackie Leverett
Zach Wasson

Second Place
Virtual Presence Device
Andrew Coles
Ang Li
Lianfei Shan
Napol Rachatasumrit

Honorable Mention
Super Beagle
Dan Zhang
Jenny Huynh