Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. Smart Home
  4. Legacy Archives

Electronic pillbox sends text message reminders to take your pills

Add as a preferred source on Google
medfolio electronic pill box
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Mentioned on Chipchick earlier this week, the MedFolio electronic pillbox utilizes LED lights and notification alerts to help the elderly keep track of their medications each day. Also an excellent idea for anyone with chronic illnesses, the large container is built with four separate, plastic bins for each day of the week designed to represent a specific dosing time. Specifically, the four boxes are labeled morning, noon, evening and bedtime. When it’s time to take a new batch of pills, a LED light will glow underneath a specific bin and will remain activated until the user removes the pills from the container.

medfolio mobile laptopIn addition to audio alarms emanating from the MedFolio electronic pillbox, the device can send email or text message reminders notifying someone to take their pills. This could be useful for anyone that lives in a large home or is simply away from the pill box for a short period of time.

Recommended Videos

On the underside of the lid covering the twenty-eight pill boxes, MedFolio has included a place to display printed descriptions of the pills in addition to clear boxes to store visual samples of what each pill looks like. This can help users keep track of what each pill is designed to do and avoid any type of overdose from a specific medication.

Later this year, MedFolio plans to launch a wireless-enabled version of the pill box that will sync usage data over a Wi-Fi home network. After data is synced to a secure server, authorized users will be able to check to see if pills are being consumed at the right time. Conceptually, this would allow concerned family members to check up on elderly relatives that live on the other side of the country. If a family member notes that pills are being skipped for any reason, they can alert medical professionals in the area if needed. 

Mike Flacy
By day, I'm the content and social media manager for High-Def Digest, Steve's Digicams and The CheckOut on Ben's Bargains…
Rice grain-sized sensor could give robots a delicate touch and keep them from breaking stuff
Sprout Robot

Robots are incredibly precise, but being gentle is not always their strong suit. A machine that can build a car with near-perfect accuracy can still apply too much pressure when working in places where even the smallest mistake matters, like inside a human eye or during delicate surgery. That is why researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University are developing a new type of force sensor that could help robots “feel” what they are touching more accurately.

The sensor is tiny, about the size of a grain of rice at just 1.7 millimeters wide, making it small enough to fit inside advanced surgical tools. What makes it especially interesting is that it does not rely on traditional electronics. Instead, it uses light to measure force from every direction, including pressure, sliding movements, and twisting. Here is how it works. At the tip of an optical fiber sits a soft material that slightly changes shape when it comes into contact with something. That tiny deformation alters how light travels through the sensor. The altered light pattern is then sent through optical fibers to a camera, which captures it like an image. Researchers then use a machine learning model to study those light patterns and translate them into precise force readings. In simple terms, the system learns how to “read” touch through light alone, without needing a bunch of wires or multiple separate sensors packed into such a tiny space.

Read more
Meta’s own employees are having a hard time digesting AI. Who would’ve thought?
Artificial Intelligence

If you wanted a snapshot of what it looks like when a tech giant tries to force-feed its workforce an AI future, look no further than Meta right now. The company that built its empire on knowing everything about its users has turned that same appetite inward, and its employees are not happy about it. Last month, Meta quietly informed tens of thousands of its U.S. workers that their corporate laptops would begin tracking their keystrokes, mouse movements, clicks, and screen activity. The purpose was to feed that behavioral data into Meta's AI models so they could learn how people actually use computers. The reaction was immediate — within hours, internal comment threads were flooded with anger, confusion, and more than a hundred emoji reactions that left little to the imagination about how employees felt.

When an engineering manager asked how to opt out, Meta's chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, had a blunt answer: there was no opt-out, at least not on a company laptop. This is the same company that is also tying AI tool usage to performance reviews, running mandatory "AI Transformation Weeks" to retrain its workforce, and building internal dashboards that gamify how many AI tokens employees consume in a day — a metric so aggressively tracked that some workers started building AI agents to manage their other AI agents. The whole thing started to resemble a feedback loop eating itself.

Read more
Sci-fi got the gadgets right, but the vibes wrong
Sci-fi got plenty of consumer tech right, but reality keeps delivering the useful, compromised version of the dream
Officer K looking up at a neon-colored hologram in Blade Runner 2049.

I was recently waiting for an Uber when the GPS decided to lie for sport. The car was somewhere nearby, I was somewhere nearby, and somehow both of us were trapped in that modern ritual of wrong pins, slow turns, vague waving, and "I'm here" messages that help absolutely no one.

That was when I had a very reasonable thought: this is exactly where a hologram of a giant arrow pointing at me would be useful.

Read more