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Abstract— People forget their medication due to busy schedules and their loss of memory due to age. They miss their medicine dosage which has to be taken at specific time. Illiterate and elder people are unable to read the names which are written on the medicines and may lead to intake of wrong medicine. The medical researchers are trying to create adherence on medication.This paper is proposed to design an automated system which reminds people (mainly elders and illiterates) about their medication schedule and also notify the user to bypass the requirement of medicine which has to be taken at specific time.
INTRODUCTION
Medication adherence is the degree to which a patient keep faith on their medicine to sustain a little more life. [3] Medication non-adherence means negligence and delays in consuming your medicines, not taking your prescriptions [4] or avoiding medication because of cultural influence [2]. Medical Non-adherence also means to un-prescribed poly-pharmacy, altering medicine, and consuming medicines in wrong combinations [5]. [2]In developed countries, medical adherence is nearly 50%. Even Worse cases in developing countries.
Medication non-adherence is critical in our country, especially in rural areas because of 1) Memory loss in the case of elders, 2) Unable to read and understand the medicines names, and 3) Lack of knowledge for usage of mobile based medication reminder applications [6]. Medication non-adherence has severe negative consequences for the patient. It leads to severe outcomes like mortality, and even increased duration of medication with higher cost [4].
The solutions are available with both Software based and Hardware based methods. The majorly of the software based solutions comprises of various medication reminder applications for various mobile based platforms which illiterate and elderly rural Indians do not know to work. The device proposed in this paper is a hardware oriented solutions. It is necessary to fill the medication pills and their schedule by the doctor or some relative who is a literate (also called as the “caretaker”). The device then notifies the patient at the required time.
A. Proposed Solution
Automated medication reminder is proposed as a hardware device based solution to these problem faced by today rural Indians. It keeps the medicines as well as the schedule to take them at specific time. It solves the problem of forgetfulness and memory loss for elderly people and efforts have been made to make this project usable for the differently abled. Automated medication reminder is designed considering no medical knowledge or literacy on the part of the patient. It considers as presence of a Caretaker who will program this device using its simple interface for the use of the patient. More details about the working procedure of automated medication reminder are as follows.
B. Paper’s Organisation
The following manner shows the paper’s organisation. In Section II it shows the proposed design of the automated medication reminder, in Section III It shows the implementation details of several modules, in Section IV it shows the Results and Section V concludes the paper.
II. PROPOSED DESIGN
Automated medication reminder is made up of two major components: Automated medication reminder Box and User-Tag. Figure 1 presents an overview of the design.
The box forms multiple small compartments where particular medicine will be kept. The main box has an LCD and a Keypad to interact with the user and has buzzers, LEDs for the notifications. It is connected to the small device USER TAG via RF Transmission which is to be kept by user at all times. The each medicine schedule for the patient will be programmed into the automated medication reminder Box by their caretaker. It keeps track of the schedule, notifies the user, and all the patients to take the medicine which is kept in the box indicated by a LED.
It also stores information like no. of pills to be taken and for how many days the medicine has to be taken.
The Working is divided into some parts:
Step 1: After receiving the medication prescriptions, the caretakerfeds the medicines in compartments and programs the schedules for all the medicines using the Keypad and LCD.
Step 2: After Step 1, all the requirements in the device. It tracks with a real time clock. When the time comes to intake a pill, it notifies the user by the LED and buzzer.
Step 3 (Notification): It notifies the patientwith a buzzer interfaced in the device and RF Transmission is used for the User Tag which is always with the user. The LED in the compartment with the medicine scheduled to be taken will turn on. The light is connected to the compartment lid, and when the lid is opened, LED and buzzer go off in the compartment is turned off.
This project is designed for rural India as the vital benefit because it considers no knowledge on the part of the patient. Once notified, the patient intakes the medicine which has corresponding LED on.
III. IMPLEMENTATION DETAILS
Automated medication reminder’s major components are one TI MSP430 Microcontroller Unit, two TI MSP430G2 RF Launch-pads and one 4X4 matrix Keypad. The microcontroller unit along with the 4X4 Keypad form the major device (The Automated medication reminder Box) and TI MSP430G2 RF Launchpad form the User Tag which is always to be kept with the user for notifications.
A. Hardware Implementation
Hardware Implementation is explained in two parts 1) The Automated medication reminder Box and 2) User-Tag.
1. The Automated medication reminder Box: A TI MSP430 microcontroller unit is the main part of this device. It is programmed to Low Power Mode, when there is no activity, to save power. The LCD and a 4X4 matrix Keypad form the User Interface of the device. A buzzer and a main LED are placed on the Automated medication reminder Box both of which are triggered during the alarm time. Keypad controls are shown in Fig.2. The Automated medication reminder Box has 5 compartments for five different types of medications. Each Compartment has one LED and 1 Vibrator which indicate the particular medication compartment during a particular alarm time. An infrared sensor is fixed in each compartment box as a sensor. The MCU unit tracks whether patient has opened the compartment during the specific time or not. The Decoder IC SN74LS138 is used to send the signal to the LEDs/Vibrators and the Encoder IC SN74LS148 is used to receive the signal from infrared sensors of the compartments box. At the time of an alarm, The Microcontroller sends the signals to the LEDs and also a TI MSP430G2 RF Launchpad having a CC110L RF module, which sends the signal to the User Tag.
The Keypad layout
2. The User Tag: The User Tag has a TI MSP430G2 Launchpad with a RF module, one buzzer and one Reset button. The transmitter end of the RF module is attached with the Automated medication reminder via MCU. The MCU triggers the transmitter at the specific time of the alarm which sends a signal to the receiver of the RF module which is fixed in the User Tag. The buzzer on the User-Tag turns upon their reception of this signal. A reset button is fixed on the User Tag which is used to turn off the alarm and puts on the snooze mode to again notify the patient after 10 minutes. The reset button does not turn off the alarm of the Automated medication reminder box, which is terminated only when the patient will takes the medication. This way, the patient can receive the notification even being far away from the Automated medication reminder device.
B. Implementation in software
The content of this section explains how the several functionalities of Automated medication reminder are programmed.
Functionalities of Automated medication reminder
The Automated medication reminder Box: Automated medication reminder Box has a TI MSP430 microcontroller, one TI MSP430G2 RF Launchpad and a 4X4 matrix Keypad. It consists of all the medication and is the main vital hardware of the whole project. The microcontroller unit is the main component as it contains all the schedules, it gets input from the patient through the 4X4 matrix Keypad and notifies the patient using the RF Launchpad at specific time. Being a ultra Low Power microcontroller, it is generally in low power mode and interrupts are used to trigger it.
The different modes are iilustrated below:
Home: By default, the device is set to Home mode which shows Real Time Clock (RTC) on LCD screen and the microcontroller is in Low Power Mode with triggering interrupts. At the time of an interrupt, it exits low power mode, executes the given function, and returns back to low power mode. Notification is intimated by an internal interrupt function and others are external hardware interrupts which are by pressing buttons on 4X4 matrix Keypad or opening the lid of the compartment