Smart Medical Box-Elderly Living Medical Assistant Design And Development

Human aging faster and the rapid development of science and technology are two major trends in today’s society. On the one hand, because of the decline of elderly cognitive and the increase in prevalence, the whole society concern more and more about their increased demands of assisted living. On the other hand, the rapid development of pervasive computing technology makes it possible that all kinds of intelligent devices embedded in the living environment of elderly. In China, the aging trend is more obvious, and their prevalence of chronic diseases is high. As their physical function and cognitive especially memory decline, it is difficult to distinguish the types of drugs only by the appearance of medicine bottles, to remember the dosage and time of medicine they should take. Therefore, the use of intelligent devices for elderly to provide intelligent reminder services, like reminding the elderly take medicine on time and according the amount correctly, become one of the important research questions in elderly intelligence assisted living area. Meanwhile, in order to further improve the safety of elderly home health and the quality of life, we also try to combine the intelligent devices and network, communication and RFID sensor technology. The network allows the elderly to communicate with others more convenient, the RFID sensor technology provide decision support for doctors through identify, track and record the elderly behavior of taking medicine and other daily activities. Our study belongs to elderly intelligence assisted living area. We want to develop an application for elderly to assisted living medical-smart medical box.The study is constituted of four stages:requirements analysis, prototyping design and evaluation, iterative prototype development and testing, system implementation. First, we get the needs of users by using ethnographic research methods. Second, according to UCD methods, we design and develop a prototype. By using heuristic evaluation and user testing, we find lots of usability issues and propose improved schemes, and then we get an iterative prototype. Finally, we develop interface and function of the system in the Android platform. The structure of this paper is consistent with the research steps. This paper describes details of research process and research results. We also summarize the problems in the research process and discuss further research work in the future.