Taking medicines can be tricky, especially for the elderly or those who for whatever reason have a diminished mental capacity. After several surgeries over the last few years, I can tell you it’s not always easy to remember which pills you’re supposed to take when, how many you’re supposed to take, and whether or not they can be taken together. I used to keep a whiteboard in my kitchen on which I’d write what medicines I was taking and what times I should take them, and I also had several of those plastic pill containers marked with days and/or times. But it gets confusing.

Hero is a NYC startup company that aims to bring the dispensing of medicine out of the dark ages and into the dawn of technology, and its product looks like a lifesaver (perhaps even literally) for those patients who take multiple pills at varying times. Did you know that taking the wrong dosages or frequency of medicines accounts for something like 125,000 annual deaths? Which also results in between $100 billion and $289 billion in healthcare costs. That’s just in the United States, so you can imagine how astronomical those numbers must be worldwide.

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Using it is simple. Just load Hero’s cartridge with whatever pills you need to take, whether prescription, OTC, or vitamin supplements. Then just program the dosage needed and how often it’s supposed to be taken, and Hero will automatically alert you when it’s time to take something and dispense the appropriate pills. It can hold up to 10 pill types at once, and is designed to handle a wide variety of shapes and sizes of pills. And no worries about coming home to a mess if you forget to turn Hero off before you go on vacation! Before it actually dispenses the pills, it asks for approval. If no approval is given, then no pills come out.

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For those of us who care for someone who may not always remember their medicine, Hero has an accompanying smartphone app that will alert a caregiver when a dose is taken or if it was skipped. Granted, it only knows if the pills were dispensed and cannot tell you if the person actually swallowed them, but every little bit helps. And the app is HIPAA compliant as well.

Expected retail is $999.00 US, but you can preorder now for just $399.00 US. Shipping is planned for early summer of this year. The basic functions of the app will be free, but to access all its premium features there will be a charge.

Source: TechCrunch

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