Intelligent medicine case for dosing monitoring and support

In Japan, the number of elderly persons who take medicine regularly has been increasing due to population aging. Since they can have the serious accidents caused by incorrect medication, we propose a medication monitoring system to detect incorrect medication. The system is composed of an intelligent medicine case, house-embedded sensors, and a database server. The case recognizes whether an elderly person has picked up correct medicine from its storage space to confirm the quantity of dosing. The case also estimates the present living condition of him/her to confirm the timing of dosing. By using the results, the case can evaluate the adequacy of medication. The sensors collect the information necessary for living condition estimation. The server accumulates the adequacy into its database. By using the system, caretakers can check the adequacy through a web interface and can receive an emergency e-mail if the adequacy becomes too low. We used background subtraction method for quantity confirmation and fuzzy inference method for timing confirmation. We confirmed that the case was able to detect 4 types of medicines in its storage space with considerable accuracy and the system was able to confirm 11 common timings with satisfactory accuracy by experiments.