Design and Implementation a Smart Pillbox

Abstract

Nowadays, Taiwan has been moving closer to aging society. An increasing number of elderly needs related medical equipment to assist their lives, such as medicine boxes and walking aids. Many aging people suffer from chronic diseases and they take pills and nutritional products. However, the elderly sometimes forgets to take medicines, such as hypertension medicines and other medicines since their memory degradation. If older person forgets to take pills, it may cause consequence diseases such as stroke. In addition, it is important for patients with chronic diseases to follow doctor’s orders. However, there are too many elderly people with “medication adherence”, this research uses a smart phone with a smart pill box to supervise and remind the elderly to take medicine. Considering that most of the users are elderly people who are not familiar with the operation process of the mobile APP in the smart phone, a novel real-time transmission of electronic drug orders was developed in the system. It supports a simple and useful user interface for elderly. In the proposed system, the doctor completed the diagnosis and sent the electronic drug list from Near-field communication (NFC) to the APP of the elderly through the doctor’s mobile phone APP at first. Then, the information such as setting the medication time and the number of days to return to the doctor are set. When it is time to take the medicine for elderly, the mobile phone APP starts the alarm to remind the user to take the medicine. In the proposed smart pillbox, we use the Arduino UNO development board to design, control, and add a time RTC clock module on the board to control the time. When it is time to take medicine, the servo motor will open/close the pillbox’s medicine port.