MedicBox: Smart Pill Reminder Box

Abstract

Medication non-adherence remains a pervasive healthcare challenge, disproportionately affecting elderly individuals and busy professionals managing complex multidose schedules [1]. Traditional adherence strategies, such as basic phone alarms or passive plastic organizers, lack reliable verification mechanisms and fail to provide remote monitoring capabilities for caregivers [2]. This paper details the comprehensive engineering lifecycle, hardware implementation, and software architecture of MedicBox: Smart Pill Reminder Box, an integrated Internet of Things (IoT) medical adherence ecosystem. The physical apparatus features a seven-compartment chassis controlled by an ESP32 edge microcontroller. Each compartment integrates precise microswitches to detect physical access events. Multi-sensory alerts are delivered via dedicated light-emitting diodes (LEDs), a high-frequency buzzer, and a localized 16x2 I2C Liquid Crystal Display (LCD), coordinated by an independent DS3231 Real-Time Clock (RTC) module. The software layer utilizes a multi-platform mobile application developed with the Flutter framework, tethered to a Firebase Cloud Firestore NoSQL database for ultra-low latency synchronization. A major innovation of the MedicBox architecture is its dual-channel verification mechanism combined with dynamic state logic that supports both Online and Offline compliance tracking. In addition, the system provides dynamic multi-role user management (Self-Use, Caregiver-Only, and Joint Monitoring), allowing for robust remote supervision. Experimental evaluations validate accurate sub-second cloud synchronization, precise hardware interaction logging, and an effective adherence escalation protocol for unconfirmed dosages.