IoT Pillbox

The IoT Pillbox should:

• By Visual and Audible Reminder, notify to take a pill.

• Should be able to tell which pills to take.

• Notifications should be scheduled through a calender.

• Solution to be used by elderly who forget taking their pills, but may not be tech savvy to use a smartphone, so extra points for a non-tech solution.

Block Diagram

We took a standard weekly pill box, and put one light below each of the individual boxes. We put one buzzer element which generates sound. A Wemos device with Blynk C code is used to receive notifications and information about which light to turn on.

Google Calender Setup

A Google Calendar is used to create 4 recurring events for each day of the week. These are Monday 9AM, 12PM, 4PM and 8PM.

Each event has a event description like 11, 12, 13, 14. The first digit corresponds to the day ( 1- Monday, 2-Tuesday..) and the second digit is the specific box number (1- 9AM, 2 - 12PM, 3 - 4PM, 4 - 8PM).

So Thursday afternoon event will have a description like 42.

The name of this event is “Pillbox Reminder”.

IFTTT Setup

In the IFTTT setup, the Google Calendar event is the input trigger.

IFTTT checks every 15 minutes if a new event with a specific name has started or no. You can set up what IFTTT has to search for.

If the event has started, the applet of IFTTT will run.

After running, the description of the event is picked up by IFTTT. This is used for further Processing

Maker Webhooks

Like Gmail and Google Calendar, a service called Maker Webhooks (or simply Webhooks) is available on IFTTT. This service can access specific public URLs with inputs.

The Webhooks service forms the Action part of the IFTTT. This URL field in the Maker Webhooks Service on IFTTT is populated with the URL of Blynk. The Description field( depicted in white) is the description of the event that fired this very action.

We have set the description of the event to have values that correspond to which day and time the pill has to be taken. This description is then passed to the Wemos device through the Blynk system.

Once it reaches the Wemos device, the buzzer is turned on and the light below the Pillbox Glows.

Final Prototype

We made the box out of Wood. The LED strip was connected on cardboard. Holes were drilled on the edge for the sound of the buzzer to come through.