A smartphone-enhanced pill-dispenser providing patient identification and in-take recognition

The wider and wider availability of powerful, low-cost mobile devices (e.g., smartphones or tablets) is deeply changing healthcare, so that the mHealth term has been coined. The announcement of healthcare projects by market big players as Apple and Samsung confirms this trend. In particular, the opportunity to collect reliable patient data automatically allows to enhance patient/user self-management and helps in better delivering therapies. In this paper, authors propose an innovative architecture for a smart pill-dispenser enhanced by a smartdevice that furnishes the capability of automatically identifying the user, other than logging medicine in-take activities. A real-world prototype, based on an emulated pill-dispenser connected via an NFC link to different smartdevices, has been purposely realized. Experimental tests confirm the architecture feasibility. Low-cost requirements are satisfied and a user-friendly interface has been implemented.