Recently our team has been working with one of our pharmaceutical clients to design a system to help their patients, mainly the elderly, manage complex dosage schedules for some of their medications. Adherence had been a big issue for them and this particular regimen involved administering 3 different types of medicine multiple times a day – each at varying schedules that tapered off at different rates over the course of 4 weeks.

Initially, we were tinkering around with ideas for apps or cheap disposable electronic devices, but due to a number of factors around cost and regulatory issues, we soon realized we’d need to come up with a purely analog approach. In the end, this ended up being a really fun challenge.

Looking at the drug schedule it became clear that the most effective design would be one that took all the complicated tables and just filtered out the information needed at a particular moment in time when the next application of medication was required.

By breaking the schedule up into days and weeks I designed a simple analog prototype by encoding the schedule on to a paper disc with a series of colored dots for each medication. Two top layers with windows rotated over the disc. The first layer could be rotated to reveal a full days schedule for the current week and the top layer would rotate to reveal just the dosage requirements at each time during the day – breakfast, lunch, dinner, and bedtime.

It’s no Antikythera Mechanism, and I don’t believe this ever when beyond our simple thought experiment, but it was a nice change of pace being able to design a low-tech solution to a problem.