MedDock: A 3D-Printed Smart Pill Dispenser with Sensitive Textile Sensor for Adherence Monitoring

One-fifth of adults in United States take at least five daily prescription medications. Maintaining a consistent medication schedule is particularly challenging for individuals with neurodegenerative disorders due to declines in cognitive and motor skills. For example, individuals with Parkinson's disease experience impaired fine motor skills and tremors, which can lead to difficulty in handling small pills or opening standard medication bottles. Additionally, the complexity of medication regimens in these patients further complicates timely and accurate medication intake management. Using a medication dispenser can help patients maintain independence in management thereby reducing caregiver burden. In this work, we introduce MedDock, a medication management system featuring a 3D-printed smart cap and a textile-based force-resistive sensor designed to automatically dispense medication at pre-set times without the users need to open the bottle cap. The MedDock device is equipped with an ESP8266 Wi-Fi Microcontroller Unit and servo motors that control the pill dispensing mechanism at regular intervals. The textile sensor is used to detect pill drop (i.e., when the pill is dispensed) and pill pick up (i.e., when the pill is taken by the user). To test the feasibility of our system we conducted an in-home experiment (N=8 healthy participants; 4 female, 4 male; 54–85 years old). The system was deployed for 3 days to the participant's home. To analyze the feasibility, we evaluated the time elapsed between pill drop and pill intake which was found to be on average of 15.97 (±7.53) seconds. We present the design, comprehensive benchtop testing, and results from an in-home deployment study, demonstrating the feasibility and effectiveness of MedDock in supporting and monitoring medication adherence.