PORTLAND, Ore. — A team of four computer science students from Portland State University won the Cornell Cup USA, a national competition for computer-aided inventions.
The project they displayed earlier this month at Walt Disney World can be used to identify pills.
It scans a pill then searches a database of 18,000 pills for a match. The answer pops up in 13.5 seconds. The invention could be used by doctors or others who need to identify a pill in an emergency.
The Oregonian reported that the winning team is comprised of four Intel scholarship winners from Vietnam.
The four, 23-year-olds returned to Portland exhausted but happy, bearing a $10,000 check from their win over higher-profile schools such as the University of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The team’s adviser, assistant professor Mark Faust, sent an e-mail to engineering seniors last October, suggesting the Cornell Cup as a senior project. Hung Nguyen, an outgoing fellow from the Vietnamese coast, promptly signed up with his friend Anh Ngo from Hanoi. They recruited Hoa Nguyen, the son of a farmer from outside Ho Chi Minh City, and Thang Vo, from the highlands of Vietnam.
The four decided to invent a device to help medical and emergency-room staff figure out what pills their patients are using. Many emergency room patients show up incapacitated or unaware of prescription details.
With six months to make their idea a reality, it became a full-time job on top of their course load, making it hard to stay awake.
“We drank a lot of Coke,” Hoa Nguyen said.
Their device looks like a miniature grain silo — a white acrylic cylinder about eight inches tall. Wires connect it to two Plexiglas cubes surrounding circuit boards the students built. The cylinder houses a camera, LED lights and a tray for inserting a pill. Inside, the lights flash in patterns to create the clearest image of the pill. Then an image-processing program of the students’ design looks for matches in databases with information on pills.
A doctor or nurse presented with an unidentified pill could spend precious minutes searching the Internet for the right shape, color and numerical imprint code then find the drug interaction warnings to avoid harmful side effects.
The PSU students’ pill identifier, in contrast, displays the relevant information in seconds.
The four students graduate next month and then return to Vietnam. In exchange for their scholarships, they agreed to spend the next three years working at an Intel factory outside Ho Chi Minh City.
The four will split the prize money, with each share amounting to five months of pay at their new jobs. But they’ve already donated $1,000 of it back to PSU’s engineering program.
“We’re very proud,” Hung Nguyen said. “It was a way for us to thank the university.”
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