Pill Minder - Automatic Pill Dispenser

Another concept involves tubes loaded with pills.

If a pharmacy were to build their own home pill dispenser, tube "cartridges" would probably be the best method for dispensing. The cartridges would be a standard size, but the internal diameter and dispensing mechanism would be tailored for the pills. Each cartridge could come with an NFC tag containing dosing instructions.

Unfortunately, we have to deal will arbitrary pill sizes and load the tubes ourselves. The concept has a place to add pills, and mechanism to auto-load tubes, and a dispensing mechanism.

The tubes would have to match the individual pill diameters. Several dispensing plates of different thicknesses could be added to the bottom, allowing a carousel to rotate the correct tube and dispense one pill at a time.

Below are concept renderings of the mechanism.

And here is a quick video of the dispensing mechanism. There is a rotating cam with a spring loaded following pin. The cam rotates one direction to select the correct dispensing plate, then rotates the other direction to dispense a pill.

Pros:

• (Hopefully) easy to load
• High density storage
• Easy to clean tubes

Cons:

• Tubes need to be changed out for each pill type
• Loading pills and dispensing might be inconsistent

Things that aren't quite figured out yet:

• Exact dispensing mechanism
• Exact pill loading method

I spent about a week fleshing out the plate concept idea. Some things that had to be figured out were:

• How to add pills
• How to remove pills
• How to make it as efficient as possible

I chose to combine the pill adding and subtracting together - using the same mechanism for both. To make this efficient, a combination lock mechanism is used to select the orientation of each "plug" individually using only one motor. The plugs would have to click into place so they don't get dislodged. Here's a project (video:youtube) by Matthias Wandel that shows the basic mechanism. Below is a sketch of my ideas.

The whole mechanism would have to be tilted to make the plate system work, so I make a sketch of the unit.

Now to evaluate the concept.

Pros:

• (Hopefully) easy to load
• Only requires 2 motors

Cons:

• The more compartments, the longer and wider it gets
• Rotating plates need to be changed per pill type

Things that aren't quite figured out yet:

• Rotating plate changing
• Load and pass-through holes can't be at 180 degrees from each other

After much thinking, I've narrowed down the dispensing mechanism to 2 ideas - a rotating plate (with holes) and a tube with plate.

The rotating plate is easy to load (just dump in the pills), but it unfortunately takes up a lot of space. The tube is very compact, but it is hard to load.

I looked at some other methods, such as a shaker plate or a conveyor, but these were eliminated because of size/noise/impracticality.

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