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It could also supply simple medical advice: "accordion to the medicine chest, it says I should take two aspirins and pull myself together". |
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It would be more worthwhile if the bottles of pills emitted a signal identifying what they were and the medicine chest cross-referenced them with what was already in there and issued an alert when it found pairs that weren't supposed to be taken together. |
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That would require sophisticated programming, which would make it much more expensive. Also, how does it know what can and cannot be taken together? Different illnesses sometimes require different combinations of medicines than another person would be able to safely take. And just because you have mulitple drugs in the chest doesn't mean you plan on taking them at the same time anyway, so it would be pointless. |
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Actually, one of the programs I had to write for a company did pretty much what I just described, only it was for nurses at home health care agencies to use instead of patients. First Databank has a unique identifier for every drug sold in the US (and uniqueness is defined right down to the point of differentiating the same drug in different time-released capsultes). There's also a schema for determining what shouldn't be used with what. You'd be surprised how often drugs that shouldn't be taken together are prescribed. Any house with a wireless system should be able to transmit updated info to the medicine chest. |
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You're right about having to have some sort of patient ID emitted by the bottles though to keep drugs that were prescribed for two different people from issuing a warning. |
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(By the way, the most interesting aspect of writing that program was where it displayed the severity of negative symptoms along with their visibility. Some had fatal interactions with no visible symptoms - unless we count death as a symptom.) |
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