A Smart Pillbox To Improve Medication Compliance

Roland Piquepaille writes "A major challenge in public health is that people do not take their medications, a phenomenon known as 'medication non-adherence.' In the US alone, it is estimated that this accounts for 10% of all hospital visits and costs the healthcare system $100 billion per year and $60 billion to the pharmaceutical industry. Now, an MIT research team thinks it has a solution to this problem that will save lives worldwide. They've developed the uBox, a convenient, palm-sized, intelligent pill dispenser, 'which reminds a patient when it is time to take his medication, records when a patient has taken a dose, and prevents a patient from double-dosing.' The first large-scale trial with 100 uBoxes is scheduled to begin in May in Bihar, India, in a 6-month long tuberculosis treatment program."

And How Does The Pillbox Know...

And how does the pillbox know that you actually took the pill, as opposed to taking it out of the pillbox so that it will quit nagging you?

Re:And How Does The Pillbox Know...

And how does the pillbox know that you actually took the pill

It should wear a condom if it's not sure.

Re:And How Does The Pillbox Know...

Medication non-compliance is usually due to forgetfulness rather than intentionally not taking it (they can't force you anyway). So really just alerting/reminding you is probably all they want to do.

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Given that you have to take the pillbox to get refilled and reset every two weeks any how, I'm not sure, other than education, there is any good way to encourage people to finish their antibiotic prescription once they are feeling better. If it wasn't for

A Smart box

If you are being treated for Parkinson's disease, it will give you another pill. If you are being treated for Alzheimer's, it will beep to remind you.

Why uBox?

Why uBox? They should call it the iBox and everybody would buy one.

I'd love something that works

My grandmother is going into assisted living this week, and up until now, I've had to nag her twice a day to take her pills. They'll administer her meds, but it's $21/day.

Probably Third-World Only

I can imagine this will only be made available to third-world patients. The liability lawsuits arising out of things like battery failure on the unit in the medical/legal minefield of the USA don't bear thinking about.

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Oh ... the Third World gets plenty of pills. Of course, not all of them work, and the ones that do maybe haven't been tested as thoroughly as one might like. Heck, some might qualify as downright experimental. So they get plenty of pills. The thing is, wha

I feel bad saying it

But there's times when I think some people just don't deserve the benefits of modern healthcare. It's just amazing how common a situation it is for people to have a deadly illness and simply stop taking their medication. It's pretty rare for them to even know the actual name of the drug, or anything about how it works. I almost died when I was just a kid, and even at that age I learned the hell out of the drugs I was on. And I certainly learned to check my watch, or at least just set an alarm. I wouldn't have cut myself any slack for not doing so at 11, and I wouldn't for any adult not suffering from a mental disorder.

Re:I feel bad saying it

The story is about initial deployment in very poor areas of India. They probably aren't missing doses because they are having so much fun playing Wii. They just may have things going on that seem larger than a pill in the context of their lives.

And even if we stipulate that certain people don't "deserve" treatment, does that mean that the rest of us deserve the antibiotic-resistant strains of TB that result from people missing their doses?

-Peter

And this is better how?

How is this different then those 25 cent plastic pill boxes that have compartments for all your drugs, all nicely labeled and sorted for each day? They easily show you what you need to take, and if you missed anything. No batteries either!

If we cant make it an 'i-something or other' and give it an IP address its of no value? Sure, technology has its place, but sometimes just common sense is all that is needed. When a hammer is all you need, bring a hammer, don't re-invent it just for the sake of inventing.

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You obviously have never seen a person of diminished capacity who's on a lot of meds struggle with taking their medications. I just visited my 91 y/o grandmother who takes about 10 pills a day from 5 different medications. She's still with it (doesn't need

Already exists

How is this better than the already-in-trials Cypak box [cypak.com], which also reminds the patient to take the pills, registers the time/date taken per pill, transfers results over RFID to doctors, etc, has the added advantage of looking exactly like an ordinary pharma blister pack?

Memory is not the problem.

The problem with this is not an issue of people needing to be reminded of the doses they've taken, or should take. The biggest issue I see is WILLFUL non-compliance with a doctors advice. Now granted, doctors are only human as well so they can make mistakes but the number of people I hear tell me that "oh well i have a pill for this, but i do not take it" because they think they know more than the doctor (which sadly is SOMETIMES the case when one looks at it in a 'knows more about this situation' issue).

This mentality is a lot more prevalent than I would have thought prior to working in travel medical insurances. The number of people who would get angry because we had to count them as treating a condition because they had a specific prescription on their history but they refused to take it was staggering. Somehow, it then becomes our fault that they have an exclusion because they were not complying with the prescribed treatment.

To get Dickens on it: Given that non-compliance is generating these costs, i'm guessing its also generating casualties, which means the tendancy will eventually be minimized across the gene pool.

Wish that helped my generations health costs though.

Protips: If you disagree with your doctor, that is what second, third, ..., n(st|th|rd) opinions are for. Self diagnosis is about as reliable as the Mitch Hedburg round-about aids test if you have no background in biochem.

Great, too bad it's illegal

Based on my understanding of US law, carying a controlled substance (anything that requires a prescription) in anything other that the official bottle it came in is a federal crime. All such daily and weekly pillboxes are illegal. My father was stopped and threatened with arrest when one such item was disovered, he had to rummage through his cary on luggage to find enough pill bottles with appropriate names and descriptions such that they let him through (though they noted that just having them out of the appropriate container was illegal). How do such pill boxes deal with the legal issues? If you take one on a trip and don't bring the bottle with the appropriate documentation, should you be subject to arrest?

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Based on my understanding of US law, carying a controlled substance (anything that requires a prescription) in anything other that the official bottle it came in is a federal crime.

WHAT!? Damn!
How come you people don't break out in derisive laughter when you hear your country described as the "land of the free"?

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In Florida a man was given the minimum sentence of 25 years for having 56 viccodin, of the 80 he was prescribed, in a valid bottle. Because, in Florida at least, any more than 50 is automatic guilt in drug trafficking. Having a valid prescription is not

A technological solution to a behavioral problem?

Oh yeah, that's not doomed to failure!

The batteries will never run out, the thing will never be badly programmed, the patient will never ignore it, nor forget it, and the workers checking up on them will always be diligent and honest. That's why it's gonna work!

I'd use this.

I'd use this. I have ADD, and one of my problems is paying enough attention to take the meds at the right time. Years ago I actually wrote software for the Apple Newton to help me solve that problem. (Huh, I wonder how hard it'll be to port it to the iPhone? Dev kit comes out soon, right?)

Anyhow. Yeah. I'd actually use this.

Say what you will...

...about this not being a solution for the multitudes of people who simply choose not to take their medications, but that's not the only goal of a system like this. It could go a long way towards helping people keep up with their doses. My mom died at 45 because one of the medications she was on gave her memory issues and one day she overdosed because she simply couldn't remember that she had already taken the drugs. If this helps anyone avoid that fate, it will be successful in my opinion.

Re:Costs ?

I wouldn't be surprised if this was RIAA-style math. What it possibly means is that the pharmaceutical industry would make an additional $60B a year if people took all the pills they're supposed to. But since people forget to take some of them, pharma considers it "lost revenue".

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Usually not, and in any case it can be a long time before anybody realises what the problem actually is, by which time damage may have been done. Also over medicating, or taking pills at the wrong frequency is also a major problem that this thing is tryin

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Because we don't know what is best. MDs are hardly infallible, can't always be on the spot, and are under enormous pressure to overmedicate. Sell more pills that way, and keeps them covered in case of a lawsuit. We still have much to learn about medicat

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Yeah, they stop when they feel better. If there was ever a need for a public information campaign this is it.