Institute For The Future

High Tech Pill Bottles

Prescription pill bottles, at first glance, don't really seem like an area ripe for innovation. But GlowCaps, a Boston area startup, may has found some creative and intelligent ways to integrate technology into pill dispensers that could has the potential to dramatically reduce the frequency with which people miss taking prescriptions.

 

Each GlowCap is filled with a 900MHz wireless chip from Texas Instruments, for example. When you get medication with a GlowCap, the device is programmed at the pharmacy with the time and frequency for your medication. The cap waits for the specified time, then begins to flash little LEDs to remind you to take your meds. But maybe the cap isn’t somewhere in plain sight, so if it senses that you missed your scheduled dosage, it moves from a visual to an audible cue after one hour. The GlowCap will play a rising crescendo in hopes of capturing your attention for the next hour.

 

If the ringing doesn't work, the caps can trigger phone calls to the patient's phone, his family or his doctor. At the end of the month, the pills generate a sharable report showing how frequently, or infrequently, the patient took his medication. And when the prescription runs out, the pill bottle contacts the pharmacy for a refill.

According to a Boston Globe article from a few months ago, the company was founded by veterans from a company called Ambient Technologies, which made products like an umbrella that lights up when the local forecast calls for rain. Their hope is that by using similar techniques to get into the ambient awareness of their patients, GlowCaps can significantly improve patient drug adherence--a problem that costs, by one estimate, $100 billion a year.