SmartMedBox: A Smart Medicine Box for Visually Impaired People Using IoT and Computer Vision Techniques

The Internet of Things (IoT) can easily connect real-life objects or physical things to the internet, thus having applications in different domains. Healthcare is one of the prominent application areas. The proposed work aims to design and development of a smart medical box for visually impaired people using IoT and computer vision methods. This application comprises of two modules: first, the QR code scanning module in the mobile app scans the QR code applied to the medicine strip by a pharmacist, it reads the entire medicine information and sets the voice alarms according to a medicine dosage schedule. The second module comprises of the medicine box, an ultrasonic sensor, and an alarm sensor connected to an Arduino microcontroller. When the user cannot find the medicine box, he presses the "locate me" button in the mobile app, and the alarm starts ringing, enabling the user to easily locate the medicine box in the indoor environment on a sound basis. On detection of an object close to the medicine box by an ultrasonic sensor the alarm stops ringing, and that will be the actual location of the medicine box. The experimental analysis of the system with 30 real-time beneficiaries, produces 86.33% accuracy in finding the location of SmartMedBox.