Pill Buddy

A convenient tool to help you remember your birth control pill every day. It uses SMS messaging to send you a text message every 30 minutes during the 3-hour window, until you dispense a pill.

Comment 3

website password: 12354

Inspiration

Empowering Women

Women deserve the right to choose But we know that choosing to remember to take your birth control pill at the same time every day can be hard.

What it does

Dispenses one birth control pill per day and sends SMS reminders within a 3-hour time window

The user loads a month's worth of birth control pills into the Pill Buddy, with the placebo pills on top. The user can then set a 3 hour time window in which they would like to be reminded to take their pill. Once they have set the time window, they can exit setup mode to display the chosen time period. Pill Buddy sends an SMS text message at the beginning of the time window indicating that the user should dispense a pill. If the user does not dispense a pill after 30 minutes, the user will receive another message reminding them to take their pill. They will continue to receive messages every 30 minutes for the remainder of the 3-hour time window if they do not take the pill. At the end of the time window, they will receive a message saying that they forgot to take the pill that day. If they forget to take the pill the next day, they will be sent a reminder message indicating the number of days they did not take the pill.

How we built it

Designed the physical contraption with Inkscape and cut it out with a laser cutter, bandsaw, and miter saw. We used python to write the code for the lcd and buttons. We also used html to make the promotional website.

Challenges we ran into

The schedule of the FRITH lab meant that we only had from 11:00a to 2:00p to design and create the box before the lab closed. We also ran into some challenges with the servo motor, but we resolved that problem by changes the voltage from 3.3V to 5V.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were able to set the time on the pico w and maintain the knowledge of the exact time even when disconnected from a laptop. We are also proud of the dispensing mechanism, as that is not in either of our specialties.

What we learned

  1. We learned how to use Twilio to send SMS text messages.
  2. We learned about new resources that are available to us in order to make the Pill Buddy possible.

What's next for Pill Buddy

If we were to continue with the Pill Buddy project, we would expand the dispensing tube such that it would be able to fit more types of medication in order to be useful to even more people.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates