Taking pills used to be something only old people did, at least, that’s how it was when I was a kid. But today, everyone seems to take pills at all ages for allergies, the treatment of illness and long term medical issues, and of course trying to stay healthy with vitamins and supplements. Keeping on top of which pills to take when requires some thought, but don’t worry, we’ll soon have Pillo to do the thinking for us. Pillo is a personal home health robot. Basically, Pillo is what happens when you combine a service like Siri with a pill dispenser. What you end up with is a robot that poops out your pills while offering medical advice. VIDEO Pillo is able to recognize different people within a household using facial recognition and then interact and dispense the correct pills for each individual at the appropriate time. It can also connect with healthcare professional, carry our auto-refill orders, links up with your smart devices such as a phone, tablet, or watch to issue reminders, and answers your healthcare questions. Such an ambitious pill dispensing robot isn’t cheap, with the final retail price expected to be $599. However, if you back the Indiegogo campaign you can secure a Pillo for the super early bird price of $269 plus shipping, and it ships worldwide. You will be left waiting until July 2017 to receive your Pillo, though. The Pillo Health team has plans to extend the functionality of Pillo if the project gets fully funded. In the future they hope to add calorie counting, stress management, baby monitoring, digital health reports, and a nutrition dashboard. Pillo will also get its own app store for even more features. VIDEO At the time of writing the Indiegogo campaign had raised $32,297 of a $75,000 goal. With a month left to go, it seems likely that goal will be reached. However, it’s a flexible goal, meaning even if $75,000 isn’t raised Pillo Health will receive the funds. This seems to be a very ambitious project, and the combination of Indiegogo, a flexible funding total, and low investment goal of $75,000 certainly look suspicious. With that in mind, be sure to do some checking before pledging money as we’re all very aware of how easily crowdfunding projects can end up not delivering the promised product.
A new health bot that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to manage a household's medication is looking for funding to extend its AI platform. The robot, named Pillo, uses facial recognition to remind family members to take their medication and dispenses it from the machine. The Pillo Health team hopes to extend Pillo's functionalities to, among other things; reorder medication in the event of low stock, sync health data from smart watches and other health apps, offer nutritional information and send notifications to carers if medication requirements are missed. So far the company has raised around $32k of its $75k target in an Indiegogo-backed campaign.