Project Proposal

Smart medical box based on robotic developments

1.     Introduction

Our modern busy life style leads to many problems and people may forget many important things [1]. If they are suffering from any serious disease or illness then it is necessary to take medicines at right time. If the patient is at home then the family members or care takers of the patient may remind patient to take medicine at proper time. But every time it is difficult for the family members to tell the patients about the medication. For this purpose there should be some facility for the patient which will remind them about their medication time.

2.      Background and Motivation

                       Some people do not respond properly to the medical treatment because of the improper administration of prescribed medication. Patients often forget to take their medicine on time. Sometimes they attempt to catch up by taking more than to prescribed dosage to compensate the missed dosage. This kind of scenario is very common when a patient has to take prescribed drugs of different types required to be taken at different times. Commonly elderly people do not have sufficient mental alertness to keep track of the frequencies and dosages of their various medicines over a sustained period of time. This may end up in death too.

                        Hicks et al, in U.S. Pat. No. 4,275,384 describes a portable medicine cabinet with a timer. There are individual compartments for pill containers. This device alerts the patient when the medicine in a particular canister/bin should be taken. Then the patient physically removes the canister/bin from the cabinet. He has to determine the prescribed dosage and manually removes the dosage from the canister. This process will be repeating for each canister as often as pills are required to be taken from that canister.

                        In Carlson, in U.S. Pat. No. 4,223,801, there is a multi-compartment container which can be filled with one day’s requirement of prescribed drugs. Individual compartments are capable of holding pills of different types, and the individual compartments are illuminated when the pills therein are to be taken by the patient. A timer is available to control the device and a reset switch which is depressed by the patient after taking the required medicine. This apparatus requires manual operation (by hand) to pick pills out of the compartments. Here the patient can simply press the reset button to stop the alarm without taking the medicine.

 We made a questionnaire to do a survey among the patients to know their problems and needs. We included the questions related to their medications. We visited some houses, Elder’s homes and visually handicapped people’s home.

From our survey we found that 65% of the patients forget to intake their tablets on time. The 85% of the candidates said that they are unaware of their tablets names and dosages. They are just having them according to pharmacist’s instruction. Nearly 50% said that they face trouble in keeping their medical box away from children. The 55% of the candidates said that they usually forget the place where they kept their medical box. It is observed that 70% of the family members are unaware of their family member’s (patient’s) medicines.

Then we raised some questions as the solutions to their problems. 85% of the family members/caretakers requested to track their family member’s/patient’s medication. Most of the patients welcomed the alert system. In the blind home they suggested us to have a voice alert to notify the tablets and the dispensing completed. And they asked us to keep a tray/box under the dispenser’s mouth to place their hand and identify the dispensing mouth.

Currently there are a lots of smart medical remainders available in the market. They consist alarm systems. These boxes consist of 7 or 14 bins. So they have to refill the box once in a week or twice in a month.  All the pills for a specific time have to be filled in a bin. There aren’t separate bins to each tablet. And mainly these boxes are only to a specific patient. Other patients in that house can’t use it. In case of emergency there aren’t any systems to report emergency service.

Common main deficiencies of exiting systems include:

• Errors that are caused by a mismatch between the actual container content and the information available to the dispenser controller causing the patient taking different dosage and/ or errors in time intervals vs. the recommended mode of administration.
• Problems that may occur due to unrecognized adverse drug interaction. An example is two or more different pills that were prescribed by different doctors that the patient is required to take in a conflicting manner.
• Current systems do not verify that the content of the container matches the prescribed drug. Such feature can reduce errors caused by human errors while filling a prescription [2].

                            Our motivation is to build a “Smart Medical Box based on Robotic development” to overcome all the above mentioned deficiencies of the existing systems and to fulfill the needs of the patients. Our medical box will be a very useful and user friendly one.

3.     Problems

People tend to forget what they have to do due to their packed schedule as the pace of living getting faster. Therefore, there are inventions such as reminder, alarm, and so on to remind us what we have to do [3].

Disabled and sick people also cannot escape from the pace of busy life. Many do not realize the problems faced by the blind people to collect their medicine on time. People face trouble to keep their medical box away from their small kids. Sometimes they forget where did they kept the box. Many are unaware of their prescribed medicines. It may tends to medication mistakes.

Therefore, we have come out with an invention, the “Smart Medical Box based on robotic development”. Unrecognized people cannot access this medical box. The invention can store medicine and will remind the users include blind people when to take their medicine with an alarm system. The “Smart Medical Box based on robotic development” can help users include blind people to take the correct medicine on time. But, initially pharmacist have to fill the box with right medicine for patients according to doctor’s prescription.

4.     Aim and Objectives

Project Aim:

The aim of this project is to develop a medical box based on robotic development. And have to develop a web application and a mobile application to monitor and maintain that medical box.

Project Objectives:

·         Prepare Questionnaire and conduct a survey to identify patients and disabled people needs and problems.

·         Develop the mobile application to the users to maintain interaction with the box and themselves.

·         Construct the robotic arm to pick up the correct pills and drop them.

·         Input the voice alert system, GPRS, GSM and sensors to facilitate the medical box.

·         Develop the security of the box (hand identification & avoid un authorized access)

5.     Methodology

According to the mentioned problem we are willing to design and build a system called “Smart medical box based on robotic development”. Our mission is to provide correct dosage of medicine on correct time without any error.

We are going to develop mobile application to pharmacist, doctor, and care taker[4].

          USERS: - Four types of users who interact with the system [1].

·         Doctor’s Office/Doctor: - The one who has to register patients and record their medical details. He has to send the prescriptions to the pharmacist. He is going to receive monthly appointment text from the box and has to response.

·         Pharmacy/Pharmacist: - He is the person going to receive patient’s prescription from doctor’s office. He has the access to enter the details about the medicine, dosage and timings of intake. He even has the access to open the box and track stock of medicine and so on.

·         Caretaker/ Family member: - He has the access to track the medication intake and stock of medicine. He will receive message if the box’s parts got damaged or stopped working.

·         Patient: - Patient is the person who needs medical care. The IOT enabled system will generate an alert signal and notification so that the patient can take required medicine at the proper time.

    

Figure 1: Sample diagram

 

        

 And the ambulance is going to receive emergency alert incase the patient pressed the emergency button in the box.

Pharmacy/Pharmacist should register with the application and the IOT device to start using the system. He should be given the access to set a medicine reminder and other functionalities. After logging to the system he will get the details of the compartments and availability of the medicine.

Whenever the medicine is loaded in any of the compartments of the pillbox, the pharmacist of the patient can record the accompanying details in the mobile application.

The name of the medicine, Amount (Quantity of intake), Schedule, Exact Time to remind, Interval details and Compartment/bin Number will be stored in the cloud and reminders will be set. The details about each of the above activities will be stored in the local database.

                        There will be a voice alert in the pill box which alerts the patient to take the medicine. It even indicates the name of the dispensing medicine too. It will be very useful for the blinds to get to know their intaking tablets. This medical box provides medicines only to the registered patients. Unrecognized people cannot get tablets from the box.

There will be a small box placed to keep the hand under the dispenser’s mouth. The correct amount of medication will be obtained through a vacuum system by which individual pills will be lifted from their containers and transported to the dispensing container. That container will drop all those collected pills on our palm.

                                   

                         After the patient collected his/her prescribed medicines for that prescribed time, it will notify through a “Thank you” voice alert to confirm that he/she has received the whole medicine. The caretaker of the patient and the patient will get the voice message to their mobile phone incase the patient missed his/her medication.

We are going to use Arduino Uno R3 which is an open-source microcontroller board [5] . It can be used to read sensors and control anything like motors and lights. We can control the board by sending a set of instructions to the microcontroller on the board to communicate between real world and computers. Arduino Ethernet Shield is to connect the arduino to the internet which is based on Wiznet W5100 Ethernet chip [6].

GPRS modem is fixed inside the box to track the location of the box. GSM Modem is to send voice message to notify the patient and the care taker if the patient missed the medication. It is also being used to fix appointment with doctor and to inform the ambulance in case of emergency.

 The power supply system receives 110 VAC from a wall outlet. It then steps down the voltage and current to the correct magnitude for each of the subsystems [7]. Incase of emergency it is equipped with a back-up battery which will provide at least 12 hours of reserve power. The pill tray will contain the user’s prescribed pill bins. It will hold up to ten different pill types bin. The motor will rotate the tray through the necessary angle so that the prescribed pill’s bin will be located on the suction nozzle assembly’s axis of translation.

We are going to use DC Micro Vacuum Pump to provide enough suction to lift and hold pills of various masses, ranging from 10 mg to 1.0 g [2] .

We have an idea to use an automatic pill dispensing technic as an alternative to robotic arm. We will design it incase the robotic arm failed during our implementation testing with the patients.

                        

5.     Project Time Plan

Figure 2: Gantt Chart

 

6.     Resource Requirements

·         Computer with 512MB RAM and 2GHZ

·         Android OS

·         Internet service

·         Mobile phone

·         Arduino Uno R3

·         Motor (to rotate tray)

·         Tray

·         Stepper Motor

·         Vacuum pump

·         Battery & Power supply

·         GPRS modem

·         GSM modem

·         Speaker module

·         Medical Box building materials

7.     References

 [1]       Balachandra Rao, Preetham M Nayak, and Sachin S Nayak, “MEDICATION REMINDER AND MONITORING SYSTEM USING IOT,” Department of MCA, NMAMIT, Nitte, Karkala, Udupi District.

[2]        Joram Savir and Gllad Ben-Zur, “Online smart pill box dispensing system   United States Patent Application Publication Savir et al.,” 03-Dec-2009.

[3]        Nur Suzaini Binti Mahd Zaki, “Smart_e-Pills_Medication_Reminder,” Apr. 2010.

[4]        Gipsa Alex, Benitta Varghese, Jezna G Jose, and AlbyMol Abraham, “A Modern Health Care System Using IoT and Android.”

[5]        C.Dinesh, P.Manimaran, D.T.Kadirvel, and D.Anand Joseph Daniel, “An Automated Medical Reminder System Architecture Using Arduino Kit,” Oct. 2015.

[6]        Muammer Güzel, Hakan Altıntaş, and Abdullah Yılmaz, “Ethernet Automated Pill Dispenser,” CAPSTONE TEAM PROJECT SPRING 2015-2016, 2015.

[7]        Ben Anderson, Kyle Smith, Matt Strasser, Jason Terhune, and Yao “Annie” Yao, “System Design and Project Plan  PEZ (Pills EZ) Dispenser,” Oct. 2010.