A Modular Pill Dispenser Supporting Therapies at Home

Modern technologies support people’s life in multiple contexts like the assistive one. The pervasiveness of the so-called “Smart Objects”, related to the Internet of Things technologies, is boosting this in many ways. The support for old people to take the daily tablets through an automatic device is an example. This work presents the prototype of a modular pill dispenser customized by end users according to their specific therapy needs. The prototype is a physical and modular set of pillboxes each containing the pills to be assumed in a therapy. The presented scenario at a specific time, set by the user, one or more pillboxes blink to alert the patient that is pill time. If for a given time interval the patient do not take the pill a sound notification is activated and plays for a given duration. If still nothing happens then a notification is sent to the caregiver’s smartphone. The behavior of the pill dispenser is defined by the end user and can be modified any time. One peculiarity of the pill dispenser is that the number of physical boxes are decided by the user and can change any time to best fit the specific therapy. The final goal of this work is to push not professional users, in particular older people, to take advantages of new technologies to improve their life.