MedAssist

Inspiration

Our main inspiration was our grandparents. They have many different pills that they have to take. They have tried some medication reminder products, but they weren't adaptable enough to their changing schedules and were often hard to use.

What it does

MedAssist is a combination of an Android app and a physical product that helps people to take their medicine. The app allows users multiple ways of configuring the timing of how the pill should be taken. The physical product then keeps track of the timing, and reminds users to take their medicine at the right time through an audible beep. The app also sends the user a notification in case they are not near the physical product. One big feature is the ability to set up an interval based medication, say three pills a day every six hours, that starts when you get up. This makes it very adaptable to the variations in people's everyday lifestyle.

How we built it

The hardware side of the project started first with coming up with a rough design and gathering all electrical components needed, such as a Raspberry Pi, LCD screen, and buttons. We used Autodesk Inventor to model the case and then 3D print the case. The electrical setup was then prototyped with breadboards, which allowed the software for the Raspberry Pi to be developed. The Android application was programmed in Dart using Google Flutter and Android Studio. The Raspberry Pi acted as our server for the app, storing data and passing it back to it. The Raspberry Pi program was written with Node.js and pushed notifications to the fun using Google Firebase.

Challenges we ran into

Google Firebase would not connect for a very long time. It took a long time to get the Pi and the app to have any communication. Only one member knew JavaScript going into the project.