IT Sligo students beat 350,000 students from 183 countries, to win the Microsoft Imagine Cup in New York during summer 2011 for their work on a road safety app. This was the first time the competition was won by Irish students. One of the team is continuing to develop the product and it is expected on the market in 2012.

The device they developed plugs into a car engine and relays information about erratic driving to a phone application, and from there to a cloud computing platform, allowing drivers and car owners to monitor where and how the dangers are being created. “It will alert the user to speed, to hard cornering, sudden acceleration, in other words things we learn from the gravitational force,” said James McNamara, one of the IT Sligo team members. “We consulted with Garda crash forensic experts during the development process to give us a better insight into what the dangers are”. The team’s solution used embedded technology, Windows Phone 7, Bing Maps and the Windows Azure cloud computing platform to create the product which they hope will change driving habits and reduce road deaths. As well as James the team included Calum Cawley, Aíne Conaghan and Matthew Padden. Their team mentor was Padraig Harte, a lecturer in the Institute’s Department of Information Systems. James pointed out that there is more to the ground breaking device than allowing vehicle owners like parents to be “virtual passengers” who can monitor how a car is being driven from their homes. It will also encourage the drivers to beat the technology by driving safely and according to the student it will make driving safely, rather than driving fast, fun. “We think one of the attractions of the product will be the computer game angle”, explained James. “Many young people love playing computer games and improving their gamer scores, we believe we can piggyback off this and use it to incentivise safe driving”.

Well done to the IT Sligo Team!