On The Design of a Novel Smart Medicine Box Towards Detecting the Medicine Expiry Date and Facilitating Medication Planning for Visually Challenged

Population growth has led to the increase of different types of medication, burden on nurses and pharmacy clerks. Studies have shown that on an average a person takes about five different types of medication for any illness. This medication has led to several other medication errors as the patient is taking wrong medicine at the wrong time in a day. This is highly prevalent in people who are older in age and for the people, who are visual impaired or challenged. These people face difficulty in checking the expiry date of the medication because of smaller text size and fonts. It is well known that consumption of an expired product is fatal. To prevent this medication error, forgetting medicine intake and consumption of expired medication; the Smart Medicine Box idea is used. It is a boxlike structure with certain compartments. The compartment has LCD screen that displays the name of the medicine stored and the date of expiration for that medicine. In addition, the box contains speaker to announce the name of the medicine and date of expiration. To assist the visually impaired to take the correct medication vibration mechanism has been set up where the compartment containing the medicine to be taken at that time vibrates indicating to the user. Image processing technique is used to process and analyse the bar code of the medication for the expiration date and the name of the medication. Ultrasonic Sensors are used to detect the pending number of pills within the compartment; a microcontroller is used to control the process. In this research effort, after a critical overview of the state-of-the-art developments in this important field we outline in detail the proposed architecture for such an efficient smart medicine box, defining its components and its preliminary UML related diagrams.