This design seeks to eliminate the challenges of taking medication. No matter if you're a healthy male in his 20's taking daily vitamins and seasonal allergy pills or an elderly woman who's dementia keeps her from taking her pills every day, this device can help. Medication noncompliance is a pressing issue that affects thousands of people who do not take their prescribed medication.
This project was developed to create a reliable system that would be able to dispense all forms of medication in timed dosages. Initial designs focused on being able to reliably select one pill from a group of many without breaking them in the process. As an additional requirement the pill dispenser needed to accommodate a wide variety of pills, large and small in differing sizes.
Over the course of a few months the project was able to successfully complete the given tasks when asked to dispense pills. As in, you could ask it to dispense one or five pills and it would dispense them.
Details
Watch as the pill dispenser selects pills from a pile of pills.
The pill dispenser is proof of concept for a much larger idea. This product has the ability to impact millions of people, especially those who are ill and need to be taking regular medication. With further development this product could help dementia patients stay independent for longer. An automated pill dispenser could help eliminate the inconvenience and hassle of taking numerous medication. It is a revolutionary product and nothing competes with it.
This is not a finished product and cant help anyone at the moment. It needs to be compatible with a wider range of pills. It needs a more robust system for storing and sorting pills. It needs to be more compact, expandable, and reliable. A lot of this work requires refining the design with mass production in mind. Along with the physical design the software needs to be user friendly and simple enough for everyone.
I worked on a projects to do just that some years ago. Basic system was a hopper and spinning discs that spread the pills out enough that they weren't piled on top of each other. Then a high-speed, low-res camera was used to detect the shapes and counts. There was more to it and I never saw the end of it but I agree that it would be a great thing. I hope it goes well!
I worked on a projects to do just that some years ago. Basic system was a hopper and spinning discs that spread the pills out enough that they weren't piled on top of each other. Then a high-speed, low-res camera was used to detect the shapes and counts. There was more to it and I never saw the end of it but I agree that it would be a great thing. I hope it goes well!