Keep taking the pills

UK design consultancy PDD has unveiled a new homecare concept designed to ensure older people fully comply with their medication regimes.

The concept, codenamed Memory Box and presented for the first time at the Medical Device Technology conference in Birmingham, guarantees prescribed medicines are taken in the right doses at the right time by delivering them via a convenient, userfriendly, timed carousel system containing cartridges pre-filled by the pharmacist.

The initiative is the fruit of a research project jointly undertaken with the Centre for Biomedical Engineering and the European Institute for Health and Medical Sciences, both part of the University of Surrey.

PDD’s proposed concept involves tablets being sealed by the pharmacist into rotating, subdivided cartridges so that each chamber in the cartridge contains the correct dosage for a particular time during the patient’s prescribed regime.

In use, the system alerts the patient at the appropriate time and opens up completely at the touch of a single button, leaving the correct dosage in an ergonomically friendly scoop. At the end of each cycle of a dosage regime (which could be monthly, weekly or even daily) the cartridge is simply replaced.