This Cute Health Robot Uses Facial Recognition to Give You the Right Pills

With Pillo, a robotic home health aide being crowdfunded on Indiegogo, there’s no need to keep track of a complicated medication schedule or when your prescription is about to run out. 

The futuristic pill dispenser uses facial recognition to register who it’s giving medication or vitamins to and drops the appropriate dosage into the cup. It stores up to four weeks worth of pills and will re-order from your pharmacy when they run out. Pillo has voice recognition, so you can ask it questions regarding health and wellness, and it will scour reliable sources for the answer, like Dr. Siri. It’s also designed to let you video chat with your physician right in your home and sync up with your fitness tracker.

In the future, it might also be programmed with extra functions like a calorie tracker, nutrition dashboard, baby monitor, fall detector, and more.

All this sounds like a tall order for a product that isn’t even finished yet (it’s scheduled to ship summer 2017), and no doubt the finished product will work a little differently than its creators are claiming now. But even without some of the fancier functions, a robotic pill dispenser could be a boon for older patients or people caring for them, or even for people taking addiction-prone medications like opioid painkillers.

When dealing with a family member who’s suffering from dementia, it’s especially hard to keep track of whether someone you’re caring for has taken all their medications for the day—since they can't remember, either. Being able to send out an alert when a patient isn’t taking their pills at the right time could be a major stress reliever for everyone, helping older people maintain their independence while still letting their family know that they're taking their medication.

[h/t The Verge]

All images courtesy Pillo Health

Know of something you think we should cover? Email us at tips@mentalfloss.com.