City students build prototype for medicine dispensary machines

After a lot of research, Veneesa J and Vinitha K polled their ideas to make a prototype for the machine that can benefit the rural population in getting better access to health facilities. “We wanted to work on something that would help the rural population. The machines will not only connect the patient to available doctors, but it will also dispense medicines based on what the doctor prescribes,” said Veneesa.

Like how we use ATM kiosks to withdraw money and approach a bank for more complicated financial transactions, this new machine will only handle cases that are not complicated. Patients will have to go to a hospital for more complicated health issues.

“The machine will be connected to a doctor, who will need to log into a portal. He will be verified by the admin to ensure the authenticity of the doctor. This will prevent quacks from misusing Medimate. Initially, the doctors will be verified with the help of their license numbers. We are considering introducing facilities for Aadhaar card verification in future. There will be green lights next to the names of the doctors who are available and red lights to indicate they are not,” she said.

Patients can choose between four languages – Tamil, Telugu, Hindi and English. The machine will then automatically show the list of doctors who can communicate in your preferred language.

The machine will record the patient’s weight, height, heartbeat and temperature and display it to the doctor. “Medimate will enable video conferencing between the patient and the doctor once the doctor has basic details,” Veneesa said.

After analysing the patient, the doctor will prescribe medicines which are available in the machine and it will be directly dispensed to the patient.

Since this is a government aided project, the treatment will be free of cost. “A cure code will be generated for each patient after the consultation. The code will help doctors to refer the case history in future.”

Excited about their project, the students hope that it would benefit the rural population.