Pill Central

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Inspiration

Our grandparents often take the wrong pills or forget to take their pills. As their health constantly deteriorates their memory does as well. We want aid their completion of this important task and even help ourselves. We wanted to help people who want to help themselves by having a system that assists the user's memory and prevents the mistakes from happening.

What it does

Our product solves the inconsistencies medication intake that ultimately improves the efficacy of the prescribed medication. Our system is a smart pill box which has separate compartments that correspond with an individual medication. Each compartment is highlighted with an LED that notifies you when you need to take that specific medication. The colors allow for easy differentiation between your pills. Accompanying the hardware is a mobile application that allows the user to set up their medication schedule as well as view their upcoming doses. The application also utilizes the differentiation between pills with color coded progress bars.

How we built it

We built it using a raspberry pi, LEDs, resistors, and buttons for the hardware. We created an iOS application that allows the user to set and view their schedule. Both of these are connected to a database hosted by Amazon Web Services that allows the application and the smart pill box to work independently but allow them to share the same information.

Challenges we ran into

A main challenge that we ran into was that the "day" objects were represented differently for different applications (ex. iOS day was represented as integers 1-7 and in the database it was 0-6). This meant we had to do some conversions on the application side that could be rendered meaningless without the correct context. We ran into similar problems with time zone implementation. This problem was solved by sending the localhost's time information to the database server. There were other minor problems that we were able to fix via mentors and other internet sources.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

We are proud of the fact that we made something so easy to use that utilizes hardware and software. We are also proud that the entire system works and can be expanded in multiple different directions in the future. We are so proud of the education we received from Manhattan College and how we were able to implement our knowledge in the HackNYU event.

What we learned

We learned how to use python to connect to a database. This enabled us to receive and parse information that then presents the information to the user, which we didn't know how to do prior to this event. We also learned multiple new techniques in Swift that made application programming more efficient. Finally we learned how to implement a database more effectively when using a real life application.

What's next for Pill Central

We will improve upon our system to expand upon our product adding new features and functionality in both the hardware and software domains. We also want to integrate our product with smart home systems and smart wearable technology. A final plan will include minimizing the hardware system utilizing micro controllers and an efficient battery that will make this product portable and storable in users' homes and travel bags.

Built With

• buttons
• leds
• mysql
• php
• python
• raspberry-pi
• resistors
• swift