A New Electronic Medication Compliance System

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The goal of this phase I SBIR is to show the feasibility of a medication compliance system enabled by ZigBee (a low-cost, very low-power, wireless network) and low-cost set-top boxes. As the United States population grows older, the importance of medication compliance increases. Researchers have identified the lack of medication compliance as a top reason for people being placed in nursing homes. Existing medication compliance systems require pills to be removed from their pharmacy prescription bottles. The proposed system does not. Small reusable pill sensor modules fit in the bottom of standard prescription bottles. The proposed system easily scales from one bottle to hundreds of bottles, which may be located anywhere in the house, and from a single user to many users in the same dwelling. Users interact with set top boxes via their televisions and infrared remote controllers, which is similar to standard television remotes. In the proposed project, KBT will demonstrate feasibility of the proposed system by prototyping the hardware and software and conducting bench tests. The feasibility goal is to prove the proposed wireless pill sensor modules can automatically and reliably communicate with the set top box. The success criterion is over 95% of the ZigBee link tests succeeding with the error recovery mechanisms disabled. With these performance results, the production system with a robust error recovery protocol will achieve near perfect performance.