Make Sure Grandma Takes Her Pills

In a world of gadgets and gizmos of singular purpose and of sometimes questionable requirement, here’s something that can make you feel good about technology’s impact on at-home medical applications.

PillDrill is a device designed to make sure you or your loved ones don’t forget to take your medication. Think of how great it would be to never use that Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday containers row that’s impossible to get pills out of – ever again!

Pill Drill operates via a Wi-Fi-enabled hub that tracks when people take their medications and reminds them when they’ve forgotten. People can attach RFID tags to their pill bottles, which gives each medication a specific identity. After someone takes a pill, he or she waves the container in front of the hub to register that it’s been taken. The device can also be programmed to shoot a text alert to whomever designated if the user forgets to dose at the allotted time. So if you’re constantly badgering your parents or grandparents to find out if they’re up to date on their dose, this might be for you.

Designers feel the RFID technology makes the product more user friendly than asking someone to use an app, which brings up an interesting point – while PillDrill’s online commercial almost brings tears to your eyes as you think about the implications, it also begs the question – what will adoption rates be like for those on the low end of the tech adoption curve, like most of the elderly, who don’t have a friend or family member around to help get them integrate PillDrill into their medication practices? You’d think these folks might be precisely the set most at risk for mis-administering their medication in the first place.

That said, PillDrill has to start somewhere and serves as a much needed component in the personal health and wellness tracking market as, what Wired referred to as “like a FitBit for taking medication.”

I’m Anna Wells and this is IEN Now.