Photos: Tech ideas for humanity

Two teams won awards this year in a new Ideas Competition category, the Yunus Innovation Challenge, which deals with problems associated with proverty. The uBox, one of the challenge winners for 2006/2007, is a low-cost solution to tuberculosis patients' nonadherence to drug regimens designed to treat the disease.

The current method of using direct-observation therapy, or DOT, workers to monitor patients is costly and difficult to administer. Team Cabangal, which included MIT alumni, grad students and undergrads, invented this pill holder that lights up to prompt patients to take their medication and records when each pill is dispensed. A visiting DOT worker can then retrieve data from the uBox with a USB-like device. The device also records when the data is retrieved so it can be entered into a database that monitors DOT workers as well as patients, and offers incentives for success.

A detailed trial of the uBox is planned for October in Bihar, India, according to Bill Thies, an MIT Ph.D. candidate who was part of Team Cabangal.