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The Reminder
Current problem
Patient monitoring and management in and out of health care facilities is a critical aspect
in disease management and the healing process. However, over the years, out-patient medication
administration has proved to be one of the most error prone areas in the modernization of health
care systems. Coupled with difficulty with drug-food or drug-drug interactions and the basic
drug over or under dose resulting from erratic intakes, patients reacting to life threatening events
such as these is on the increase. Most governments have included laws which have significantly
reduced most medication administration errors, that is over the counter medication by ensuring
medication is only issued to patients with prescriptions but the aspect of patients forgetting to
take their medication has not been fully tackled. Even the current medication reminder systems
have done little to curb this problem more so for patients who have taken medication for longer
periods of time.

Current solution
The current medication reminder systems comprise of a carrier device which is
assembled with an associated medication alert assembly that includes at least one alarm device
which produces an alarm signals to remind the patient to take the pre-selected medication already
packaged in the carrier device. The carrier also has a controller and a timer which enables the

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user to set a pre-time interval corresponding to the standard dosage time in hours and the specific
amount of the dose of the selected medication he/she is supposed to take. With these features the
carrier is solely controlled by the controller which activates the alarm upon expiry if his initial
pre-set interval directing the user which medication he/she is supposed to take and at the specific
dosage. The carrier also has a reset switch which enables the operator to deactivate and reset the
alarm afterwards (Rooney & Rooney).

Problems/ Virtue with solution

However, chronic disease patients, that is individuals suffering from epilepsy, diabetes,
hypertension, asthma, anticoagulants and cardiovascular diseases have large quantity of
medications to take which change frequently still have a problem monitoring and managing their
conditions using these technologies. They regularly require physician's attention and cannot
carry all their medications around. They at times cannot remember to keep track of their medical
supply and tend to forget to buy more.
Secondly, when chronic conditions cannot be controlled by medication, these current
medication reminder systems cannot keep track of the patient's symptoms and alert the user or
better yet alert their physicians when the patients brush away these symptoms. At times these
medication reminder systems have resulted in the patients increased visits to their physicians and
further led to an unnecessary change of medication, additional tests and or procedures, increased
emergency room visits and even to the extend of hospitalization. As much as the sole purpose of
medication reminder systems is to remind the patient to take his/her medication, the underlying
cost of these visits to their physicians is not only wasting time but increasing the overall costs of
disease management.

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Proposed solution
The aim of this project is to design a reminder device that will not only remind patients to
take the correct medication at designated times but it will also record the users medication intake
schedules, remotely transmit these schedules to a nearby computer and automatically forward
these schedules for patients respective physicians for further monitoring and analysis. The
following design project will propose a few modifications to the existing Pillboxes which will
make it able to alert the patients to take their medication no matter the variety but attaching an
alarm system which will trigger the attached recording device to record the medication intake
schedule and at intervals of 24 hours remotely send the schedule to a nearby computer,
preferably a mobile device which will further relay the schedule to their respective physicians.
Our project will make use of locally available materials such as a pillbox, an alarm
system comprising of an audio transducer, a vibrating tactile device and a light emitting diode, a
Bluetooth and a wireless device, RAM and ROM memory, a microprocessor, capacitors,
resistors, a liquid crystal display (LCD) screen, a regulator, a step down transformer and a reset
switch. The alarm device will be attached on the pillbox ensuring the light emitting diode (LED)
is visible on the outer surface of the box. On the alarm system, a real time clock (RTC) will be
attached it which will enable the device to keep accurate time.
The attached Bluetooth and wireless devices are synchronized with the users
Smartphones which are supposed to be connected to the internet at all times. This is to ensure the
Reminder can be able to access internet and send the recorded schedule to the physicians office
via email.
The LCD, RTC, reset switch, LED, vibrator, Bluetooth and the wireless devices will be
attached to the control unit comprising of the RAM and ROM memory and the microprocessor

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using the capacitors and resistors to ensure all devices receive the required supply of power. The
control unit will be attached to the regulator to ensure optimum supply of power is attained at all
times from the step down generator. However, for all these devices to work appropriately a
suitable processor is needed.
LCD Panel
s
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h
e
d
u
l
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r

Microprocessor
A/D converter

RTC

Attached to RAM
and ROM memory

Wireless adapter
and transciever

Smartphone
alarm