Design and feasibility of a safe pill bottle

Abstract

Ubiquitous intelligence of Internet of Things (IoT) objects and new sensors provide innovative solutions for a variety of health issues. Unintentional child poisoning represents an increasingly important health issue worldwide, partially because of an increase in the use of drugs and food supplements. Although child-resistant bottle caps have probably saved many lives, they are not foolproof and do not provide warnings for parents and caregivers when children try to access the bottles. In this paper we present a design, implementation, and feasibility analysis of an intelligent “safe pill bottle” that can identify when a child is trying to open a bottle and then generate an immediate warning to deter a child from opening the bottle and send alerts to parents/guardians. The bottle controller uses capacitive sensing to identify the class of user. We present the results of pilot testing with eight adults and eight children using neural networks (NN). With 474 bottle-opening events, our NN had 96.4% accuracy of predicting whether the user was a child or an adult. Preliminary results demonstrate that smart pill bottles may be an effective tool to prevent unintentional child poisoning.