Smart Medicine Box

Our ECE 4760 final project is to build a microcontroller based smart medicine box. Our medicine box is targeted on users who regularly take drugs or vitamin supplements， or nurses who take care of the older or patients. Our medicine box is programmable that allows nurses or users to specify the pill quantity and day to take pills, and the serve times for each day. Our smart medicine box contains seven separate sub-boxes. Therefore, nurses or users can set information for seven different pills. When the pill quantity and time have been set, the medicine box will remind users or patients to take pills using sound and light. The specific number of pills needs to be taken will be displayed by a seven segment led display placed on the corresponding sub-box. Compared with the traditional pill box that requires users or nurses to load the box every day or every week. Our smart medicine box would significantly release nurses or users’ burden on frequently preloading pills for patients or users.

There are five major components for our device, including a pill box containing seven separate small boxes; a speaker module; a 3×4 keypad; an Atmel 1284p microcontroller; seven segment LED display (7 units); and a 2×16 characters LCD screen.
Functionality of each component:
Keypad: Keypad is used for the user or nurse to enter the information of time when the smart box would send “reminder” (displaying numbers and playing sythsized voice). It is also used for the user to enter a number to command a specific pill box to open on a specific day. (say, open No.1 pill box on Monday), and user can also enter the freuency infromation to take pills for each day. The keypad is also used for stopping the music and led display when the user has taken the pill.  LCD: The 2 line, 16 characters LCD screen is used to display the instruction information, the number of pills need to be taken, and the current time and date.Speaker Module: The speaker module is used to play the sythesized sound to remind the user to take pill.

For more detail: Smart Medicine Box