Abstract
This thesis describes a smart indicator system that helps prevent errors by pharmacists when filling a prescription. The indicator system uses an optical tag scanner (barcode, QR code, etc) to input a machine-readable tag that encodes the prescribed medicine and lights up the corresponding cell in the medicine cabinet. It is flexible to support several subdivisions of cells for different sizes of drug packages. It also allows multiple pharmacists to fill different prescriptions in parallel. The indicator system has been designed with a short-range wireless communication interface for easy deployment. The novel row-column scanning circuitry also minimizes the number of general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins that are required of the microcontroller unit (MCU) for maximum scalability with minimum hardware. Additional software techniques also ensure maximum stability of the wireless connection. Experimental results show that our proposed design achieve all these goals, making it an attractive candidate for commercial implementation. The resulting system represents a major step towards eliminating most gruesome or even deadly mistakes that pharmacists could make while still keeping the pharmacists in the loop to catch potential mistakes made by the prescribing doctors.