14 DAY TRIAL // Lots of patients get special prescriptions from their doctors. Also, lots of those people routinely forget to take their meds on time, or at all. To cut down on the number of people who hasten their death or illness this way, AdhereTech made a wireless pill bottle.
Said pill bottle will alert patients when they have to take their medicine, and also keep track of when they took them and in what quantity.
It might sound like a bit much for something like this. After all, illness and possible death should, in theory, be enough of a motivation to do as the doctor says.
Nevertheless, the problem is a real one. Only about half of all patients take meds as doctors say, especially after six months of treatment have passed.
It's why health problems are more recurrent than they should be, and isn't exactly a boon to pharmaceutical companies either.
Granted, the elderly have the excuse of forgetfulness, but that only adds an extra reason to making a pill bottle like this.
So how does it work? AdhereTech says the bottle connects to a cloud service wirelessly and collects usage data, sending out alerts as needed.
Said alerts are sent to patients' cell phones through a text message of by just blinking a light on the bottle itself.
A battery had to be used here of course, and it should last for 45 days on a single charge. A charger is bundled with it.
The AdhereTech invention also benefits from a wireless CDMA chip, which measures when the bottle was opened and how many pills were taken.
Now the only potential problem is that, while people won't have an excuse to miss their med times, they might start forgetting to recharge the bottle instead. That can be remedied by having someone else check on it as they would on the patients themselves though.
AdhereTech plans to partner with drug companies to ship the bottles through pharmacies.
