HelpmePills: A Mobile Pill Recognition Tool for Elderly Persons☆

Abstract Aging is a natural process typically characterized by loss of capabilities such as vision or memory. These transformations interfere with quotidian tasks performance sometimes leading to dangerous situations for senior adults. One of the most relevant is related with the wrong ingestion of medication or even forgetfulness. This kind of mistakes represents a real threat to elder's health and life. Furthermore, the existing technological solutions concerned with this problematic, are designed for professionals or general public disregarding elderly needs in particular. Thus, in order to overcome this lack of support, it will be presented an image processing tool, which represents the first steps for a larger toolset adapted for elderly persons, under construction. The procedures followed by this proposal include image acquisition and pill characterization based on its shape, dimensions and colors. The system uses these features in the learning step to describe and store pills information on local database. Later, in the recognition step, the same features are determined and compared against database in order to provide the user with relevant informations related with the pill under recognition.