Embedded System Design for Pill Boxes with The Low Power Electronic Paper Display

Abstract: The rapid development of technology in the health-care sector has led to the discovery of many new illnesses and improved treatments that were not possible earlier. However, many treatments and medicines for a specific disease often come with several side effects. The accuracy in treatments with an optimal result on specified targets is therefore desired with minimum side effects. This requires that the production and the usage processes should be precise. The scope of this study is not about the medicine production phase but rather on managing a medicine schedule. How many times a medicine should be taken in a day is strongly related to its dosage and following a precise timing plays a crucial role in the individual’s health. As a solution, a pill box based on a low power display (Electronic Paper Display, EPD) together with an embedded system has been introduced by the project owner (Victrix AB, Stockholm) .The pill box should have some different functions like alarms, data logging and wireless reporting. Different types of alarms including ringtone, vibration and voice recording/playing are required as well. To be able to trace the already planned timing for taking medicines, system will be able to save and report history of the past 100 days. Since every single idea for solving different parts of the problem should be tested in real system, a Quantitative Research based on experiments be used and the best possible solution be selected and implemented in the project. Studying technical material and also related works besides analyzing generated data after each experiment were a useful tool for the system integration in this work. As the result, a pill box based on an embedded system was designed and integrated successfully. A hardware platform, in form of a prototype system based on an ARM microcontroller and a compatible embedded software have been designed, improved and tested successfully and are available. At the end of this work, the low power E-paper display works properly, alarms can be set and activated, data can be saved and also sent wirelessly. Basically, the result of this project shows how an embedded system can be specialized and programmed to be able to interact with patients and e.g. nurses in order to make a stable and continuous connection between them. Most of determined goals have been achieved and some of them be changed and modified during the work. Also a few additional functions and improvements be suggested as future work.