Dosing timing recognition by Ubiquitous Sensors

In Japan, the number of elderly recipients who take medicines regularly has been increasing due to population aging. Since they sometimes induce serious accidents caused by incorrect dosing (e.g. forgetting to dose), we propose intelligent medicine case (iMec) for assisting in monitoring. iMec recognizes whether a recipient has picked medicines up from its correct storage space for confirming dosing quantity (e.g. 3 pills and 2 capsules). iMec also estimates the living state of him/her to confirm dosing timing (e.g. before eating breakfast). It collects the information necessary for living state estimation by using sensors placed in the recipient house and informs the dosing condition of the recipient to caretakers thought a server computer. By using iMec, they can check the dosing condition anytime, anywhere. And, they can also receive e-mail immediately when iMec detects signs of incorrect dosing. We confirmed that iMec was able to estimate the present living state related to common dosing timings by experiments.