Problem:

As people get older, they tend to need more medications. Unfortunately, some elderly people begin having difficulty self-administering medications. Focusing on pills, here are some of the difficulties encountered:

• Pills are too small to separate
• Medication regimes can be difficult to understand
• Forgetting to take pills
• Taking too many doses in a day
• Losing track of the day/date/AM or PM/time
• Forgetting to re-order pills
• Opening bottles

The goal of this project is to mitigate as many pill-taking issues as possible. The end product should try to address as many of the following goals as possible:

• Easy to use
• No fine motor control necessary
• Understand or help interpret medication directions
• Dispense pills at correct times
• Remind user to take dispensed pills
• Display time/date info in easy to read/understand way
• Re-order or remind to re-order pills
• Help open the bottle

Ideas:

• Make the system modular by having a separate container/unit for each pill type
• Use a rotating disk (at an angle) with holes in it for pill dispensing
• (or) use a tube with insert for pill holding
• Make the modular system provide power to the next module
• Make the modular system provide force to the next module
• Use a combination lock style mechanism to open/close a dispensing gate for each module
• Use a base station that has all the motors/electronics
• Sense a new module with some sort of cascade circuitry
• Have a "top" module for inserting pills