Previously submitted to: JMIR mHealth and uHealth (no longer under consideration since May 19, 2021)
Date Submitted: Sep 21, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
The Smart Pill Bottle: Introducing a Pill Management system based on Touchpoint Technology
ABSTRACT
Background:
Older adults tend to suffer from multi-morbidity, requiring complex treatment methodologies demanding poly-pharmacy. The increasing medication usage can tend towards the mismanagement of prescriptions and irregular or faulty administration. Thus, there arises an urgent need for a proper pill management system for these prescribed medicines. The solutions offered by the current market seem to be sub-optimal; they either fail to be cost-effective or fail to provide much the required assistance.
Objective:
We propose a mobile, cost-effective, robust, and easy to use solution involving the extension to the human body-smartphones and pill bottles
Methods:
The technology utilizes a unique combination of touch-points on the smartphone screen to recognize the medication and give information regarding the proper usage and dosage. The building of the pill management system was conducted in two phases; first, the pill bottles were developed since these were to be detected and identified, followed by the mobile application, which did the whole pill management.
Results:
Our tool comprised of two components–(1) the conductive ink enabled pill bottle containing a unique combination of conductive inks and (2) the mobile application utilizing the touch-points generated by the conductive ink sticker to give information of the corresponding medicine. Whenever a pill bottle is placed on the mobile screen, the conductive ink imitates the finger touch effect creating a unique touch pattern which is detected on the mobile screen. It is analyzed by the mobile application, holding the database of the corresponding medicine assigned to that specific touch pattern, and the user is provided with the medicine and its dosage details.
Conclusions:
Our smart pill bottle system presents a novel implementation of touchpoint technology. Further, being easy to use, affordable, and compatible with simple equipment, our system showed feasibility in implementation and usage.
Citation
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