The Problem
We’ve all had medication pill bottles and forgotten what the pill was for, what its contradictions were, and what the pharmacist told us about when we were given it. For individuals taking a large number of prescriptions daily the problem is compounded.
Our Solution
We developed RxView, a prototype showing how a phone could be used to display medication warnings by holding a pill bottle in front of the phone’s camera. This prototype takes advantage of the Android Mobile Vision Text Recognition API to read the prescription label and then retrieves drug label information from OpenFDA.
The problems we ran into were twofold:
- First, medication pill bottles are not easily read. As shown below, the typical orange pill bottle is round which prevents the entire text from being read, and placement of the drug name is not consistent across pharmacies. The one exception we found were pill bottles from Target Pharmacies which were wedge shaped and had the medication on the top of the bottle.
- Secondly, even when were able to successfully detect the medication name on the bottle, OpenFDA labeling information is quite problematic. While an API exists, the results are inconsistent as labeling information is not mandated by the FDA.
Innovation does not always result in a win, but there are always lessons to be learned and improvements to be made and / or identified.
