Artificial Intelligence techniques and tools have been applied to Assistive Technologies (AT) in order to support elder or impeded people on their daily activities. A common application are intelligent pill dispensers and reminders that help the patient comply with his medication. This has become even more important, as patients suffering from multiple pathologies are prescribed cocktails of drugs that require strict compliance in order to achieve a successful treatment. Existing intelligent pill dispensers tend to focus in the user-tool interaction, neglecting user’s connection with its social environment and the possibility to monitor patient’s behaviour, effectively adapting to a dynamic environment and providing early response to potentially dangerous situations by detecting unexpected or undesired patterns of behaviour. In previous work we have presented COAALAS, an intelligent social and norm-aware device for elder people that is able to autonomously organize, reorganize and interact with the different actors involved in elder-care, either human actors or other devices. In this paper, we present SPiDer an intelligent pill dispenser integrated with the COAALAS architecture.

Peer Reviewed