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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."
How is this better than the already-in-trials Cypak box, 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?
This is only partially correct. It's only illegal if you do not have the original prescription information from the bottles in your position. So yes, if your father didn't have his scripts with him then he would have been in trouble, otherwise the security guards that questioned him were on their typical power trip.
Yeah, they stop when they feel better. If there was ever a need for a public information campaign this is it.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.