Development of an IoT-Based Smart Medication Dispenser with Real-Time Monitoring to Improve Patient Medication Adherence

Abstract

Patient medication adherence in Indonesia remains a serious challenge, with reported non-adherence rates reaching 57% among chronic-disease patients, while conventional manual supervision by medical staff is time-consuming and prone to human error. This study aims to design and build a prototype of an Internet of Things (IoT)-based Smart Medication Dispenser equipped with real-time monitoring to improve patient medication adherence in a hospital environment. The system is built around an ESP32 microcontroller integrated with a DS3231 real-time clock for schedule accuracy, an RFID module for staff and patient authentication, a servo motor as the dispensing actuator, an ultrasonic sensor for retrieval verification, a DHT22 sensor for storage-condition monitoring, and a buzzer with an LCD for audio-visual notification. Activity data is transmitted to Google Firebase and displayed on a web dashboard for remote monitoring. The system was evaluated using the black-box testing method across seven functional scenarios covering initialization, staff configuration access, schedule notification, patient verification, retrieval confirmation, and timeout handling. The results show that all tested scenarios executed successfully: the system accurately dispensed medication according to schedule, restricted configuration access to authenticated staff only, and reliably logged and transmitted retrieval status—including "Successfully Taken", "Skipped", and "Not Taken" conditions—to the dashboard in real time. These findings indicate that the developed prototype can serve as a practical and reliable technological solution to support medication-adherence monitoring in clinical settings.