dthunesWe had a meeting last night, a decided we may have put the cart before the horse. Once we decided to go with the cartridge design, we just assumed it would have an internal "tube" holding the pills. We failed to look at alternative methods of packing/storing pills. Below are a few more pill dispenser ideas:
The idea I'm most excited about is using a blister pack because it is already an acceptable packing mechanism in the industry. We could possible also handle the reel like an SMT reel. Some potential down sides include foil chunks being dispensed, large volume required to store reel, and used strip storage. Another idea we had was using thinner plastic to hold the pills, similar to string cheese (singles) packaging.
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Sorry to say, but I've already seen pill vials that track when/if you're taking medication. They don't get used very often due to price, but there are a couple companies that make them. You're also going to run into an issue with using blister packs just because they don't make those in huge strips (plus, there's already a pretty fancy machine out there called the Tiara that will cut out an individual dose from a strip pack for you).
Look at strip packs. Those are often distributed in a box, but there's no sort of tracking on it. If you can sort out a dirt cheap way to track when it comes out of the box, that's something that I haven't yet seen in the wild.
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Thanks for the input. Our current approach is to develop a way for OEM's to store the pills, and build our machine to use the new pill storage method. This is mainly a proof-of-concept, and not an end-all solution anymore. I had not thought of using the actual strip packs before. I feel like a different mechanism would be needed for each pill type.
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