Automatic Pill Dispensing for Senior Citizens

This project was created for fun!

Github: Here!

A big problem senior citizens have is reminding themselves what pills to take at what time. To help alleviate this problem, I decided to design and test an automatic pill dispenser that uses servos to actuate pills and a Raspberry Pi to act as a server on which to run the scheduling script. 

The scheduler uses a hash dictionary interface to provide O(1) lookup for times (time:pill). This way, we can cycle through multiple pills and still provide a second-level time granularity. Furthermore, the scheduler allows the user to input an email address which uses SMTP server forwarding in order to send a confirmation email for relatives, so that they can stay confident their senior citizen is taking their pills. 

The user inputs the times by scanning their prescription using an interface provided by Tesseract, an Optical Character Recognition API (OCR). This then feeds the plaintext into a dictionary using Natural Language Processing APIs such as Google Cloud.

This is a work in progress and will resume after Summer 2018. Improvements include: Django frontend, GPIO modularity, better actuation mechanism. 

Dependencies: OpenCV(Tesseract), GPIO, OS, sys, smtp