Pillbuddy began as an Arduino hack meant to remind forgetful people to take their pills. Apart from sounding an alarm around pill-time, and lighting the LED of the correct compartment, Pillbuddy can sense whether a patient has taken his/her pills (using a photo-resistor at the base of each compartment) and can send tweet and text-reminders to the patient and his/her caregivers.
The pillbox started as sketches, and was finally fabricated by making a CAD in Autodesk Inventior, and 3D printing the top pill tray.
Here’s a picture of an early prototype:
In the summer of 2013, I realized that an important missing link of my Pillbuddy box, was the lack of caregivers’ ability to communicate about the medications their patient was taking. It’s often necessary, especially for caregivers that don’t live with the patient, for caregivers to be able to remotely leave comments for the patient or other caregivers, or even for caregivers to be able to remotely modify alarm times. To meet this need, I started working on a companion web-application hosted on heroku here: http://dry-lowlands-1091.herokuapp.com/.
This website allows caregivers to collaborate in changing the patient’s prescription schedule (by adding, modifying, or deleting prescriptions), and the home page then displays a real-time digital representation of which pills should be filled in which compartment.
This platform is a work in progress: for the web-app, I’m currently working adding the ability for the caregivers to remotely change alarm times using the web-application. I’m also planning to change the pillbox itself to make the number of compartments more flexible and modular. I plan to make each compartment it’s own cube, and to allow individuals to purchase cubes individually, and snap them together to create a pillbox spanning however long a period of time they wish to fill at a time — a day, week, or even month.
Leela Amladi 