A smart medication system using wireless sensor network technologies

In this work, a smart medication system, which employs the wireless sensor network (WSN) technologies, is designed, implemented and demonstrated. The primary functions of the system include medication reminding, pill-dispensing assisting, and medication recording for the patients with chronic diseases. The proposed system, which can be easily deployed in a nursing home where many elderly people live together, consists of a master panel (MP) and seven portable smart pill-boxes (SPBs). An MP serves as a network gateway/database for the SPBs registered under the MP. Each SPB, which stores user's daily doses of pills, can independently remind the user to take medicines at specified times. The star topology is used for the communication between an MP and its seven affiliated SPBs. The tree topology is employed as the routing network among the MPs. Moreover, by using magnetic sensors, a pill-detection module is proposed for detecting the existence of pills in an SPB's pill-cell. A WSN communication configuration, which can effectively reduce packet-loss rates, is also proposed. The relationship between round-trip times (RTTs) and hop counts is measured.