TL;DR: Pillsy is an app that automatically tracks doses and sends intelligent reminders so you don’t forget. In March 2015, three co-founders (Jeff, Chuks and Otto) came together to develop a tech product that attempted to solve the problem of ‘missed dosage’. As recent as 2003, research by Medsafe revealed that 80% of patients occasionally missed a dose (I wonder what that stat would be now). Asides from death caused by medical errors such as a wrong diagnosis, a considerable number is also caused by not taking drugs to prescription.
What Pillsy has done is fuse hi-tech (bluetooth + AI) coupled with behavioural psychology to deliver value to customers.
How it works
There are 3 key entities in the Pillsy system. They are the medication bottle/cap, the app and you.
As a patient on medications all you need to do is set-up and enter your schedule on the app, that’s all. P.S – if you are too frail to do so, nothing says you can’t get a loved one to manage this entire process for you. In fact, they have a sharing feature for a loved one to receive notifications when you miss/take a dose.
When it reaches the scheduled time, the PillsyCap fitted on the bottle (which is already enabled with Bluetooth) will ‘beep and blink’ then the app will send you a reminder. This reminder can range from lock screen notifications like the one you get when you receive a new Twitter message on your device to text messages and even phone calls. The PillsyCap is so smart that you do not need to open the app to every time you take your dose. It simply keeps track when you open the bottle and marks the dose as taken. What that does automatically ensures that you don’t take a dose twice, because it keeps track!
With so much electronic mediation, what you find is accountability and availability of data that can be mined to improve their services and personalise user experiences. Here, you can see your medication history. This helps you to know when and how often you’ve taken your drugs and track improvements in your dose usage.
I’ll summarise Pillsy as a Google Personal Assistant dedicated to your medication.
Ask yourself: why memorise a thing when I can be reminded easily?
Please watch this video to get more context:
It currently retails for $39 and is HIPAA-compliant, hence, it can’t sell your (medical) data, which happens to be the trend now in our world where Data is seen as a raw material.