Designing a semi-autonomous medicine dispensing mobile robot using IoT with obstacle detection capabilities

• Main Authors: Ching, Maria Victoria Tuazon, Dionisio, Margaret Justo, Garbo, Stephen Gabriel Fernandez, Red, Jann Carlo Nano, Salloman, Vince Macanas
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2022
• Subjects: Hospitals—Drug distribution systems; Robotics in medicine; Mobile robots; Internet of things; Electrical and Computer Engineering; Robotics
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etdb_ece/16; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1024&context=etdb_ece
• Institution: De La Salle University

Self-isolation of patients is necessary in order to prevent the spread of a contagious disease, and administration of medicines remotely proves to be one strategy in limiting physical contact between healthcare workers and infected patients. This is where advancements such as an automated medicine dispenser are useful. The created prototype is able to automatically dispense a patient’s medicine at the set time and self-navigate to another patient using line-following technique. It can dispense three types of medicine, namely Biogesic, Advil, and Fern-C. Setting of dispensing schedule is possible using a user-friendly program interface that can be accessed using a smartphone or LCD attached to the robot.