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Problem Statement:
Everyone in my immediate family has pills and vitamins that must be taken at regular intervals, but sometimes they miss a day, run out of pills unexpectedly, or take them on the wrong days due to forgetfulness. While calendars and reminders are helpful they are easily ignored and do not help you find your medicines either if you have multiple bottles.
Goal:
My smart pill tracking system will send reminders to the user when they should take their medicine and also flash to help users keep track of their pills. It should also track the amount of medicine left in the bottle and let the user know when to refill.
Process:
The first step in developing this prototype was to narrow down the sensor to use to measure the amount of pills in the bottle. I was originally going to keep a running measurement of the number of pills remaining based off of weight from a load cell/FSR or by using some sensor to help count the pills, but both of these methods were too imprecise to give meaningful data.
Instead I decided to do a more binary measurement based off of the approximate height level of all the pills left in the bottle.
I used a distance sensor to measure the height level of the pills, and have the LED signal an alert if the height level is lower than some set number. This is measured as distance from the cap using an IR distance sensor.
I also attached a switch underneath the cap so it gets pushed down when the bottle is closed.
