A touchscreen-equipped medicine case as a medical interface for assisting an elderly person in medication management

In this paper, we propose a new intelligent medicine case with a home medical interface (iMec G2) to assist an elderly recipient in taking his/her medicine adequately. A touchscreen was equipped in the front surface of the iMec which was tilted backward. The home medical interface for self-medication support was displayed on the touchscreen and handled by the recipient´s fingers. The elderly recipient could confirm the information related to his/her prescription by touching a virtual medicine and could contact a recipient´s caregiver by clicking an icon if necessary. The new iMec recognized medicine in its storage cartridge by an improved image processing method and evaluated the adequacy of dosage and dosing timing. By an experiment, we verified that the iMec G2 was able to create the home medical interface correctly and indicate a particular medicine which should be taken.