Smart medicine dispenser

Introduction

As we experience in real life, congestion and overcrowding of patients can be considered as critical parameters in the healthcare quality, safety, productivity and patient's satisfaction towards healthcare services.

Let's pay attention towards a ward of a hospital.The standard daily routine in the ward comprises of ward rounds by doctors, medication, meals, visiting hours and bedtime. This routine may vary if patients are required to undergo laboratory tests, x-ray, or other clinical procedures. Within those activities, our consideration put on ward rounds and medication.

Except some private hospitals , most of government hospitals are used to follow traditional way of ward rounds and medication that means normally doctors do ward rounds by checking patients and assigning or changing prescriptions written on a paper.

Further, medication is a responsibility of nurse. Currently, they manualy select medicines according to the prescription given by the doctor. Significant problems that are arised within the current process as following.

Hand written prescriptions

Poor hand writting of prescribers lead to confuse drug names, dose and meal. This may cause to adverse health effects and even accidantal death.

Heavy work load assigned to nurses

Much of nurses’ time is spent with patients, monitoring them, planning and delivering care, and advising them on their health. Shift work is common in nursing, as is a busy workload.

Highly time consuming process

Nurses dispense medicines after going through the each prescription manually.It takes significant time duration.

Our solution

It is an embedded hardware device which can be controlled using mobile/web application.

Hardware device

An automated container which contains tubes assigning the respective drug. There is a secured way to put drugs inside it.We plan to control it by giving permission to authorized person by introducing finger print method. Apart from that, there is a mechanism to select meal of drugs for a patient according to his or her prescription and finally all tablets collect to a cup under the device.
Mobile/Web application

Mobile application uses to control the hardware device as well as monitor patient details.Main users of this application are doctor, nurse and guardian. Doctors can register patient into the ward, assign or edit prescription and dispense medicine.Nurses are restricted to edit prescriptions.Apart from that nurses are eligible for other functions which have for doctors. Guardians only can do is observe the medicine history of the patient.

Solution Architecture

Frontend

Frontend is mainly focused on maintaining user experience.This includes everything that user sees on a mobile app. Our mobile application provides following user interfaces.

Cloud server

Cloud can be reffered as the head of the system.Hardware device,Frontend and database connect to the cloud being in purposes of storing and processing data.Cloud also allows us for high scalability.

Hardware device

(Sensors & Actuators)

Sensors take data from the environment and convert it into electrical signals so that it can be processed by a computer.

Actuators, in turn, make connected devices act upon commands sent from the server. According to our device, once actuators get a command, it makes the device behave to select tablets.

Database

A database management system(DBMS) serves as the interface between the user(or applications) and the database. The program allows direct communication with the database, permitting data retrieval, updates, optimization, and the overall management of the information stored in the database. According to our problem domain selecting a reliable DMBS is very important since we are frequently dealing with the stored data.