WHack Only

Magazine with rotary pill dispenser
Rough sketching of design idea
Detailed dimensions of the motor unit

Inspiration

As people get older and accrue more and more health problems, the number of medications to keep up with become ever more daunting. As a result, people end up missing doses or losing track of which medicine to take at which time. In fact, remembering which of the 20 or so medicines to take at dinner time was a problem my late grandmother had to deal with. We now try to fix this problem by automating the medicine dosage schedule, so that patients do not need to remember the fine details of their medicine schedule and thus live a less stressful life.

What it does

It takes solid medicine into specific magazines. One magazine for each medicine type. This process is to be done at the pharmacy by the pharmacist who can be trusted to get the medicines correct. The patient then takes the loaded magazines home and slot it into the dispenser. The onboard chip registers what the magazines are loaded with and syncs the medicines up with the patient's schedule.

When the patient comes to take their medicine at medicine time, the patient needs to load a small container into the dispenser. They then swipe their RFID card on the card scanner. The machine reads the prescription on the card, selects which magazine to dispense medicine from, and dispenses the medicine accordingly into the patient's container. The container can then be retrieved and the medicine consumed.

How we built it

The prototype is built out of recycled acrylic and 3D printed parts. We laser cut the acrylic into the desired shape and glued the parts together to form the magazines. The magazine holder is 3D printed and built to hold 3 magazines for demonstration purposes.

Challenges we ran into

"How do you dispense exactly 1 pill?" This was the biggest challenge faced, as pills come in a huge variety of sizes and we wanted to make a one-size-fits-all solution. In the end, we decided to custom make the magazines to fit certain common pill sizes, and rely on the pharmacist's knowledge to correctly load magazines with the correct pills when differentiating between pills of the same shape but different types.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The trickiest part is the code. None of our group members are proficient in C++, but that is what the Arduino board we are using is coded in. So half the team was dedicated to learning C++ on the fly and writing the scheduling, dispensing, and RFID code.