Medispense

Inspiration ⭐

32 million Americans take 3 or more pills every day. However, roughly 50% of prescriptions are taken incorrectly. This leads up to 125k deaths in the US every single year.

We build Medispense to solve this problem.

What it does❓

Medispense takes in a drug prescription as user input (either through manual entry or photo entry) and records important info regarding the detail of taking this prescription such as frequency and dosage. Medispense sends reminders to the physical dispenser at the correct interval with the correct dosage making it easier to keep track of your medicine.

How we built it ⚒️

We built Medispense using cardboard and recycled drug bottles (as well as the parts given in the hacker package). As for software, we used ardunio, python, react native, golang, terraform, openAI, and more.

Challenges we ran into ❌

We ran into many challenges while building Medispense, but these were the most notable:

Learning how to connect the arduino using wifi and ensuring that all components (Terraform, app, and Arduino) could effectively communicate with eachother
Dealing with physical barriers in our hardware

Accomplishments that we're proud of ✅

Some accomplishments we are proud of include:

Learning to navigate arduino’s crappy ide
Figuring out how to use wifi connection to connect our server and client
Staying up until 3 am :)

What we learned 🧠

We learned how to use arduino and the modules around it, how to integrate software and hardware, and how to meet new people.

What's next for Medispense ⏳

The next big step for Medispense is making it more compact. The resources given to us during this hackathon weren’t quite able to make our product as portable as we would’ve liked it to be. In the future, Medispense could be something that you carry in your pocket.