2Mg

Simplifying medication management with IoT technology to improve health outcomes. Our smart prescription bottle and app both tracks and prompts intake, refills, and syncs with GCP for analytics.

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Inspiration

We were motivated to solve drug overdose from the very beginning. A member mentioned plastic drug bottles polluting the ocean after people have flushed them down the toilet and people not taking their medication. We wanted a way to ensure that does not happen by having a retrieval system of unused pill bottles and a way to monitor the amount of pills a user takes while simultaneously addressing the issue of drug access in remote communities and pill bottle wastage. That is how 2Mg was born.

What it does

We are 2mg and our company manufacturers and developed a smart prescription bottle with a complementary app to improve medication management by being an IoT device. Our reusable and eco-friendly product helps to get rid of easy to lose, and hard to manage prescription bottles. Our product includes a wide range of features compared to the conventional prescription bottle, such as led lights synced to the status of medication needs, phonetic features to locate lost or misplaced bottles, pickup for unused pills for those living in rural areas and Bluetooth for easy connection. The LED light notifies the user when the pill bottle needs to be refilled and the buzzer creates sound when the user needs to take their medication. When the pill bottle is running low, the app will notify a nearby pharmacy to deliver their prescription to their house if they are in rural areas. Notifies the user and emergency contacts within the app when pills are unaccounted for. This is for possible overdose.

How we built it

There are two components to our project: The Hardware and the Software. For the hardware part, since we did not actually have access to the hardware components, we decided to use a hardware simulator (TinkerCAD) to fine tune the circuitry of our product. The Arduino UNO board is attached to the Raspberry Pi which itself provides the device’s ability to have WiFi and Bluetooth Technology. Then, attached to the Arduino board is the buzzer and the load sensor along with the motion sensor on the bottleneck.

Moving on to the software side of things, we built the basic structure of our app on Android Studio. We have an induction charger on the bottom (in order to ensure that the battery life is maximized), the Python code that is written to hardcode the Arduino has a “sleep” option in the Main for loop. This process is known as Hardware Interrupt. Then, the raspberry pi is coupled with the Arduino Uno board, the load sensor and the buzzer using the I2C Protocol. If the load on the sensor drops down to a certain value, the LED lights will turn on. That means the user will know when to get a refill.

Challenges we ran into

Software: The developers never used Android Studio before making this project and one of them never used Java before, so she had to learn from scratch. They wanted to run the code on a real device, so they had to connect it to a phone. They had to do USB debugging and put their phone into developer mode. Furthermore, they also had to figure out how to use an emulator. The formatting was not the way we wanted, but they fixed it after seeing how they can improve the user experience from the emulator.

Hardware: The hardware side was absolutely new to us because we have never worked with Arduino and Raspberry Pi Kits before; that too in an online environment. It was interesting but challenging to watch a bunch of online tutorials that did not explain to the full breadth how we could use the online simulator. Moreover, it was not akin to the real thing so it wasn't the same experience.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of having excellent teamwork. As soon as we had our idea and what we wanted it to look like, everyone was immediately assigned a role. As a group of 4, 2 people were assigned as the software developers, one person was assigned the role of a graphic designer/business manager and the other was assigned the role of the Hardware Specialist and Graphic Designer. We all knew what we had to do and we were not afraid to ask our other teammates for help. Our team was a mixed basket with people with diverse backgrounds such as Health Sciences, Business, Engineering, and even high school.

What we learned

We learned how to use the Arduino and Raspberry Pi and their various functionalities. We learned that an Arduino was best for hardware and recognizing input and creating outputs. For example, when the pressure on the pressure sensor is 10-20% of the full capacity, the Arduino will turn on the LED light within the cap to notify the user that a refill is needed. We also learned that a raspberry pi is a mini computer that has the WiFi and Bluetooth technology that allows the pill bottle to connect to the mobile app.

What's next for 2mg

We want to be able to assemble the hardware to test our prototype. Since it was a virtual competition, we were not able to do so. As for the business aspect, we would like to sell our data collected on the app to the government, so that they can set aside funding for those who need it the most regarding overdoses and medications. Therefore, our goal next time is to focus on the backend (we focused a lot on the frontend this time), but we would eventually like to see our data integrated into the GCP and used for analytics purposes.

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