Prototype Work In Progress

I sighed yet again. Grandma had forgotten to take her medication yesterday, while she had mistakenly taken it twice the day before. Me being busy during the day with no one else to monitor her, I found it difficult to ensure she correctly eats her medication in the right dosage, and on time. Not to mention my own difficulty in remembering to take my own vitamins daily.

Imagine this: What if we had a pill bottle with a digitally fitted bluetooth screen equipped with a lock on the bottle cap? The screen, a digital clock timer, tells you when to next take your pill. A reminder alarm would then be sent via bluetooth to one’s watch or handphone, and the pill bottle would automatically be unlocked. Once opened, the timer resets and the bottle relocks to prevent accidental double dosage. Better still, the bluetooth is further tagged to the Pharmacist's database in tracking their patients’ dosage.

Aligned with sustainability efforts, instead of plastic, the pill bottle will be made out of environmentally friendly and degradable materials like bamboo. Unlike glass which is fragile and breakable, bamboo does not break on impact when dropped. This will help elderly who suffer from muscle atrophy and often drop bottles, or even when traveling where the bottles are placed in luggages that are thrown about. Fitting the cap with the screen would also allow reusability of the cap on different pill bottles, only requiring a simple change in input timing.

Other possible suggestions by my kind and helpful classmates: a smart watch fitted with drawers for pills, with the drawer automatically sliding out open at the time of input.

Possible roadblocks: weight of the watch, spillage of drawer at an inconvenient time (could be mitigated by a small pin switch that may be pressed manually to open the drawer, rather than an automatic opening).