STEM-In-Action Fall Follow-Up: Prescription Protectors
Welcome to another STEM-In-Action Grant Fall Follow Up, where we check in with our 2023-2024 STEM-In-Action Grant winners to see what they've accomplished since NJ&EE! If you're new to the STEM-In-Action Grant program, the U.S. Army Educational Outreach Program (AEOP) awards five STEM-In-Action Grants of up to $5,000 to eCYBERMISSION Regional Finalist teams wishing to further develop and implement their projects in their communities. This week, we're checking in with team Prescription Protectors.
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Hello, Our names are Eoin, Saicharan, Sajith, and Naren, and we are the Prescription Protectors. We are from Raleigh, North Carolina.
Due to a mutual interest in STEM, our team has been competing in different STEM competitions since the 6th grade. When we discovered this competition from our Team Advisor, Thenmozhi Kandasamy, we were eager to continue working together. After our first year of competing in eCYBERMISSION, we enjoyed the experience as we learned how to apply science. We learned to help solve real problems within our community, and we continued with the competition for another 4 years. We are in the 10th grade, and eCYBERMISSION has greatly helped us learn how to use STEM to impact our community. After receiving the STEM-In-Action Grant, we plan to use this to improve our device and even start testing it in the real world.
Seeing our grandparents struggling for many years to remember to take their medicine, we decided to devise a solution to help the elderly and others who may have trouble remembering to take their medicine. We researched and found that this was a massive issue as people with dementia often forget to take their medicine or overdose on their medicine. There are around 6.7 million people who have dementia, and this issue can affect all of them. After learning about this, we started brainstorming ideas to help solve this massive issue. With further research, we concluded that creating an automatic pill dispenser was the most efficient solution.
The pill dispenser works in two scenarios. The first is for the elderly, with multiple reminder methods like phone notifications, a speaker, and a vibration bracelet. The second scenario is for people with mental health conditions. We secured our device using a biometric so that only the right people can access the medicine. With the STEM-In-Action Grant, we plan to develop our device further.
We plan to prove that we can create an affordable, reliable, and effective device to maintain medical adherence with the $5,000 the Grant provides. To do this, we’ve redesigned multiple features, including the vacuum pump, microcontroller, and a few others, but to implement these in our device, we met with the Chief Technology Officer at Porticos. We used their advice to help us implement these features, allowing us to be confident in the reliability of our device. Our main plan involves using most of the STEM-In-Action Grant to create a pilot test. With this pilot test, we will deploy our device into the supervised homes of people who consented to the test to determine how effective our device is in real-life scenarios.
Additionally, with that information, we can collect data on where our device lacks in features, reliability, or overall user experience. In addition to the prototype, our team is actively pursuing education on prescription safety and medical adherence in our local community. Utilizing funds for travel, we plan to provide at least five presentations in senior living facilities, schools, libraries, and other areas that struggle with issues caused by medicine. Again, with feedback from these presentations, we know that we will slowly be able to create a refined device that can be implemented in the real world based on the criteria we set at the beginning of our project.
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