About Us.

Our Goal

Our goal is to help patients to adhere to medication compliance to improve human health.

We are developing cost-effective portable systems and machines that integrate state of the art technologies to monitor patient adherence to medication doses and schedules, dispense accurate medications, and send reminders at the scheduled times.

Introduction

Millions of people in the world take medications and a large number of them take multiple different medications prescribed by more than one doctor at multiple times a day. It is difficult for patients, especially older patients or patients with disability or cognitive difficulty, to keep track of these medications (in the form of pills) and take them correctly. This can lead to discrepancies in which pills the patient is supposed to take and what pills the patient is actually taking. Additionally, these patients spend a lot of time either opening pill bottles several times a day to take medications or they take these pills out in pill boxes once or twice a week. Importantly, older patients can have trouble taking these pills out in pill boxes and may be confused between different pills; often their family members have to help them by taking the pills out in the pill boxes. Some solutions to the problem include having pills prepackaged in various bubble wraps or pill pouches and delivered to the patient’s home one month at a time. However, if the medicines need to be changed within the one month of dispensed pills, it is highly burdensome for a patient to change the pill schedule and they are often unable to change the medication schedule correctly.
There is an urgent need to have a home-based pill dispenser system which can dispense pills per dose into various compartments without the need to sort out pills in advance. The pill dispenser system should be able to react to dosage changes in real time and be user friendly. This project seeks to develop a pill dispenser system with a user interface to dispense pills into desired compartment at preprogrammed times set by the user utilizing a custom designed wheel rotation system. The interface will be established for the programming of pill doses and times and to remind the user to take their medicine.

An automated pill dispenser system with remote control, for example via a smart phone, will be highly useful for patients and family members to manage the medicine doses for older patients and patients with cognitive disability.
This project aims to develop a pill dispensing system where pills of various sizes and shapes can be dispensed consistently one at a time upon command without being broken or crushed, as well as create a user interface that will allow the user to interact with the pill dispensing system and control the timing and desired number of pills.

Design of the electronic system:

Pill holding chambers, tilted ground parts to hold pills to be dispensed, cups to hold dispensed pills, wheels/gears with custom grooves to receive pills from the pill holding chamber and successfully drop pills in cups underneath were designed and 3D printed.

The machine was assembled by attaching pill wheel/gear with the stepper motor, which was in turn connected to the Arduino Mega circuit board via Darlington Arrays to control the rotation of motors. The Wi-Fi module and Real Time module was connected to the Arduino Mega circuit board. The android app on a personal phone was connected to the Arduino Mega circuit board via the Wi-Fi module wirelessly.