A Homemade Pill Dispenser Prototype Supporting Elderly

People, and mainly elderly people, need a continuous support for different reasons. Recent technologies are offering many possibilities that was not possible to conceive in the past. In particular, the proliferation of IoT devices raise the need to standardize protocols and interaction languages. The aim of this work is to create a device for the management of pills according to the user’s therapy, with Internet of things (IoT) devices and by allowing users to manage the pill dispenser by themselves. The work falls into two main areas of current research: the End-user development (EUD) and the Internet of things (IoT). The main issue we cope with such device is to allow the different therapies for each person and for each drug. We propose the EUDroid system, which provides the end user with the possibility to easily activate LEDs and buzzer related to pills from the users’ smartphone. The user chooses the type of pill to be associated to each LED, the day and time of activation and some other property. A formal language to configure the device has been adopted in order to allow users to build complex conditions for remind to follow the therapy.