Many people struggle with remembering to take their medications. We wanted to leverage smart technology to help people remember to take their medicine!

At Hack OHI/O 2019, we created a smart pill dispenser that reminds people to take their medications. Patients or their caretaker can specify a schedule for each of their medications. The dispenser keeps track of how many pills are left, what times the medication is dispensed, and if the pills are actually taken.

We built a mobile-friendly web app where the medication schedule is entered so the pills are dispensed at the correct time. The medication history is visible, showing if pills were taken, and if so, when they were taken. Text notifications are sent out when the pill is dispensed, if the pill is still not taken after a specified amount of time, and when a refill is needed.

A physical prototype was constructed to show our idea in action. Hardware components include an Arduino, NodeMCU, servo motors, a display, and an ultrasonic sensor. The dispenser communicated with the web app over Wi-Fi.

Our project got third place overall at Hack OHI/O 2019, Ohio State’s flagship hackathon with over 800 attendees. Web app development was done with Ruby on Rails and JavaScript. Arduino development was done with C and C++.

The Team

Alex Shearer

Alex is a second-year undergraduate at The Ohio State University, double-majoring in Computer Science and Data Analytics. In his free time, he likes to create games.

Andrew Jivoin

Andrew is studying Computer Science and Theoretical Math at Ohio State. He wrote some Ruby code and took some pictures and videos of the project.

Jon Zimmerman

Jon Zimmerman is a Mechanical Engineering student at Ohio State. Fun fact: He is a hardware hacking professional and hates being written about in README files.

Andrew Lubinger

Andrew is studying Computer Science and Engineering at The Ohio State University.

Video

If you want to see our project in action, check out this video!