1. Automated Medicine Dispenser
ECE Computer Engineering Design Project
Automated Medicine Dispenser
Riel Fehr Erick Ochoa Steven Wells
2014
The Motivation
Every year people are diagnosed with life altering illnesses that require some very important, high risk medications. Taking these high-risk medications require serious attention to adherence and timing. There is a great concern with adherence, causing all in the medical field to find a suitable method for increasing adherence and punctuality.
There are a few methods in place in the current market including: portable pill box timers, blister packs, and personal medical personnel. These all pose their own problems: pill boxes allow access to pills at any time, blister packs have an absence of alarm, and personal nurses can be very expensive while not allowing flexible timing.
System Input/output Flow
1  User receives pill cartridge from pharmacy containing a “Medi-Code”.
2  User inputs the Medi-Code for the correct cartridge slot into the system website.
3  Alarm will blink when pills are to be taken. The user then presses the dispense button to receive pills.
3.5  Alternative to alarm blinking: User wants to leave the house for a few hours, so they press the button to see if current time is within “flex-time”. Dispense if yes, display wait time if no.
4  When cartridge is low, the system displays the pill count. When it becomes empty, the system displays which cartridge is empty and needs replacing.
Website Features
Pill time and Flex-time ~ Pill times are set by pharmacies as usual, and uploaded to their server when cartridge is given to the user. ~ Users can enter their schedule they wish the pill times to work around, which pill times are then added to a flex-time, mentioned in step 4.5, left.
Current Pill count ~ As all prescriptions have pill counts, they are gathered by the website after Medi-code is entered, and the system keeps track to inform the user when low/empty.
Special Medication Instructions ~ Many medications have special instructions such as: take with or without food, or don’t take with other medications. The website specifies these instructions and displays them on the LCD if a corresponding pill is dispensed.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Duncan Elliott, Herbert Dexel, Rick McGregor and a special thank you to Nancy Minderman.
Fig. 2: Full project, prototyped with 3 different medicines.
The Method
Above is a secure automated medicine dispenser that is hooked up, via Ethernet, to the Altera DE2 board. A website, shown to the right, gives the users input (pill number) to the board, which takes this number and queries the pharmacy’s website that contains the associated medication information. The medication information is then sent back to the system (board) and used to dispense the various pills at the correct times after an alarm begins.
The website is customizable for daily schedules which allows for an early button press if user needs to leave the house for a while.
For colour ideas, University Visual Identity Guidelines can be found here:
Fig. 3: Webserver screenshot of inputting Medi-Code.
Fig. 1: Close-up of single dispenser.
Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering