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WiFi-enabled pill bottles
By adamg on Thu, 08/13/2009 - 10:16am
Xconomy reports that Vitality, based in Cambridge, has come up with a new way to remind doddering boomers to take their medicine: Pill bottle caps that connect to a small wireless router that in turn connects to a database that knows when they should be alerted to take their medicine. When it's time to pop a pill, the cap begins to glow orange and starts playing some music to take a pill by. Ignore it and the music gets louder and "more insistent."
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Comments
What if you are taking the
What if you are taking the pills to treat visual and auditory hallucinations?
Anon FTW!
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HEEEEEEE, but...
I laughed my ass off at that, but you actually make a good point. When we're looking at healthcare studies about how noncompliance plays a role in community health, we have to remember that a sizable portion of the people who don't take their meds regularly aren't missing them because they're garden-variety forgetful or busy, but rather because they have cognitive deficits and/or thinking errors that aren't going to be cured by any meds currently on the market. A lotttttttt of folks miss their meds because they're not very well oriented to when/why they need to take them, or they get suspicious of the meds and think they're poisoned, or they're so concrete that it's a totally foreign concept that you continue to take your meds even when you feel fine right now. Remember too that a lot of people who take psych meds for years end up with diabetes and hypertension and a whole laundry list of meds because of the meds. So a good portion of the people taking just about ANY med are going to be people with major mental illness. The regular-old-people-who-forget-their-meds-sometimes are just a tip of the iceberg of the "compliance problem" that public health folks talk about. And the beeping pill bottle is really only going to help these tip folks.
http://1smootshort.blogspot.com
neat!
ah, yes, compliance! these gadgets promise to recover billions for the pharmaceutical industry. (should also save lives of patients.)
I just saw posters for a
I just saw posters for a study involving these go up in my office today. I figured that would precede the commercial launch, not coincide with it.
How about on the pill?
There's a biotech firm out here that's come up with a way to embed a small biodegradable microchip into the pill! It's in the clinical trial stage at the moment. The user wears a large patch on their back or stomach (looks like a large adhesive bandage) that transmits the vital signs of the patient and then relays that information to a computer for analyzing. Ultimately it's supposed to allow for a patient's caregiver to see that the med is being taken when it should.
The glowing cap thing makes a lot of sense, especially if you take multiple meds at different times of the day.
Hmm...all fun and games until
This will be great until someone puts the wrong pills with the wrong cap and it's set for 3-per-day instead of 1-per-day and someone dies of an O.D.
It's not entirely clear what safeguards there are to making sure that the outside of the bottle and the internal reminder timer are in sync.
Also, their next model (due out soon) is supposed to house an AT&T cellular modem so that it can call their company to complain about non-compliance (which then causes an automated phone call to you about missing your pill by 2 hours). This function is currently handled by wifi to your home computer network and onward to their computers over the internet. What kind of battery is a cell modem going to need? Am I going to have to recharge my pill bottle lids? AT&T??? They're ALREADY balking at giving all the iPhone users multimedia texting and internet tethering because of not having enough infrastructure to handle the bandwidth...and you want to add 2-20 pill bottles per old person's medical cabinet onto the grid??? Screw that.
They work
I was a beta-user of the early product and it totally rocked. One-hundred percent compliance was very easy. I used it to remind me not only to take my pills, but also to feed the family fish.
We're both healthier for it.
Ratted out by a wireless chip
Affordability can affect compliance, too. If I take my meds every other day, they'll stretch twice as far and cost half as much. What's the bleeping pill bottle going to say about that? Ever scarier, what's the insurance company going to say? "Oops, you've been skipping your meds -- bye!"